The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

by Thomas Metzinger

This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconcei...

Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious.

First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds.

Then, they generate an inner image of oursel...

This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also our relationship to the past and the future, as...

The internal image of the person-as-a-whole is the phenomenal Ego, the “I” or “self ” as it appears in conscious experience; therefore, I use the terms “phenomenal...

The phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image—namely,...

By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we expe...

we possess an integrated inner image of ourselves that is firmly anchored in our feelings and bodily sensations; the world-simulation created by our brains includes the experience of a point of view.

we are unable to experience and introspectively recognize our self-models as models; much of the self-model is, as philosophers might say, transparent.

Transparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us. We do not see the w...

A conscious world-model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model—we look right through ...

The central claim of this book—and the theory behind it, the self-model theory of subjectivity4—is that the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large...

The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realiz...

The Ego is a transparent mental image: You—the physical person as a whole—look right through it. You do n...

The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others. Whenever the organism needs...

If—as, for instance, in dreamless deep sleep—the tool is not needed anym...

It must be emphasized that although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there is no l...

The Ego and the Tunnel are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical self-o...

Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world by letting it ...

Variations of this tunnel metaphor illustrate other new ideas in mind science: What would it mean for an Ego Tunnel to branch out to include other Ego Tunnels?

What happens to the Ego Tunnel during the dream state?

Can machines possess an artificial form of self-consciousness, and can they deve...

How do empathy and social cognition work; how can communication take place from...

Finally, of course, we must ask: Is it possible to lea...

In the first chapter, I confine discussion to the phenomenon of conscious experience and develop a better and richer understanding of why exactly it is exclusively internal. One question to be addressed is, How can all this take place inside the brain and at the same time create the robust experience of living in a reality that is experienced as an external reality?

All evidence now points to the conclusion that phenomenal content is determined locally, not by the environment at all but by internal properties of the brain only.

The subjective sandalwood-and-amber experience doesn’t require incense, it doesn’t even require a nose; in principle it can also be elicited by stimulating the right combination of glomeruli in your olfactory bulb. Glomeruli (there are some two thousand of them) take input from one type or another of your olfactory receptor cells.

If the unified sensory quality of smelling sandalwood and amber typically involves activating smell receptor cells of type 18, 93, 143, and 211 in your nose, then we would expect to get the same conscious experience—an identical odor—by stimulating the corresponding glomeruli with an electrode.

The question is, What is the minimally sufficient set of neural properties? Could we selectively elicit exactly the same phenomenon by doing even less, ...

Most neuroscientists, and probably the majority of philosophers as well, would answer yes: Activate the minimal neural correlate of a given conscious experience ...

The problem of consciousness is all about subjective experience, about the structure of our inner life, and not about knowledge of the outer world.

One way of looking at the Ego Tunnel is as a complex property of the global neural correlate of consciousness (NCC).

The NCC is that set of neurofunctional properties in your brain sufficient to bring abo...

feel. The incessant information flow in this global NCC is what creates the tunnel, the world in which you live your conscious life.

But what is this “you”? As I claimed at the outset, we will never have a truly satisfying comprehensive scientific theory of the human mind if we don’t dissolve the core of the problem.

Why is consciousness subjective?

The most important question I seek to answer is why a conscious world-model almost invariably has a center: a me, an Ego, an experiencing self.

An Ego Tunnel is a consciousness tunnel that has evolved the additional property of creating a robust first-person perspective, a subjective view of the world.

It is a consciousness tunnel plus an apparent self.

This is the challenge: If we want the big picture, we need to know how a genuine s...

This genuine conscious sense of selfhood is the deepest form of inwardness, much deeper than just being “in the brain” or “in a simulated world in the brain.” This nontrivial form of inwardness is what this book is about.

PART ONE THE CONSCIOUSNESS PROBLEM

ONE THE APPEARANCE OF A WORLD

Consciousness is the appearance of a world. The essence of the phenomenon of conscious experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: If you are conscious, a world appears to you.

This is true in dreams as well as in the waking state, but in dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavai...

Consciousness is a very special phenomenon, because it is part of the world and cont...

What sets human consciousness apart from other biologically evolved phenomena is that it makes a reality appear within itself.

It creates inwardness; the life process has become aware of itself.

Judging from the available data on animal brains and evolutionary continuity, the appearance of worlds in biological nervous systems is a recent phenome...