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

by Thomas Metzinger

In Darwinian evolution, an early form of consciousness might have arisen some 200 million years ago in the primitive cerebral cortices of mammals, giving them bodily awareness and the sense...

In any case, an animal that cannot reason or speak a language can certainly have transparent phenomenal states—and that is all it takes t...

The empirical evidence for animal consciousness is now far beyond any reasonable doubt.1

A much more recent phenomenon emerged only a couple of thousand years ago—the conscious formation of theories in the minds of human philosophers and scientists.

Thus the life process became reflected not only in conscious individual organisms but also in groups of human beings trying to understand the emergence of self-conscious minds as such—that is, what it means that something can “appear within itself.”

This property, as noted, probably distinguishes us from most other animals on this planet: the ability to turn the first-person perspective inward, to explore our emotional states and attend to our cognitive processes. As philosophers say, these are “higher-order” levels of the PSM.

They allowed us to become aware of the fact that we are representational systems.

Human beings in other historical epochs—during the Vedic period of ancient India, say, or during the European Middle Ages, when God was still perceived as a real and constant presence—likely knew kinds of subjective experience almost inaccessible to us today.

Meaning does change structure, though slowly. And the structure in turn determines our inner lives, the flow of conscious experience.

Some fear that a materialistic disenchantment, along with advances in the sciences of the mind, may have unwanted social and cultural consequences.

We have also come to understand that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing affair, a phenomenon that either does or does not exist.

It is a graded phenomenon and comes in many different shades.

Consciousness is also not a unitary phenomenon but has many discernible aspects: memory, attention, feelings, the perception of color, se...

However, what we do not know is how far discovering such neural correlates will go toward explaining consciousness. Correlation is not causation, nor is it explanation.

First things first, however. Before we can understand what the self is, we must look at the current status of consciousness science by taking a brief tour of the landscape of consciousness, with its unique complex of problems.

Scientifically, we are at the very beginning of a true science of consciousness.

What makes you so sure you are not in a vat right now, while you’re reading this book? How can you prove that the book in your hand—or your hand itself, for that matter—really exists? (In philosophy, we call this game epistemology—the theory of knowledge. We have been playing it for centuries.)

the flow of experience certainly exists, and cognitive neuroscience has shown that the process of conscious experience is just an idiosyncratic path through a physical reality so unimaginably complex and rich in information that it will always be hard to grasp just how reduced our subjective experience is.

Shadows do not have an independent existence. And the book you are holding right now—that is, the unified sensations of its color, weight, and texture—is just a shadow, a low-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional object “out there.”

This state-space itself may well have millions of dimensions; nevertheless, the physical reality you navigate with its help has an inconceivably higher number of dimensions.

The shadow metaphor suggests Book VII of Plato’s Republic. In Plato’s beautiful parable, the captives in the cave are chai...

the images appearing in the Ego Tunnel are dynamic projections of something far greater and richer.

TWO A TOUR OF THE TUNNEL THE ONE-WORLD PROBLEM: THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Once upon a time, I had to write an encyclopedia article on “Consciousness.” The first thing I did was to photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references.

I wanted to know whether in the long history of Western philosophy there was a common philosophical insight running like a thread through humanity’s perennia...

To my surprise, I found two such essen...

The first is that consciousness is a higher-order form of knowledge accompanying thought...

The Latin concept of conscientia is the original root from which all later terminologies in English and t...

This in turn is derived from cum (“with,” “together”) and...

Interestingly, being truly conscious was connected to moral insight.

(Isn’t it a beautiful notion that becoming conscious in the true sense could be related to moral conscience?

Philosophers would have a new definition of the entity they call a zombie—an amoral person, ethically fast a...

many of the classical theories stated that becoming conscious had to do with installing an ideal observer in your mind, an inner witness providing moral guidance as well as a hidden, entirely private knowledge about the contents of your mental states.

Whatever we may think about these early theories of consciousness-as-conscience today, they certainly possessed philosophical depth and great beauty: Consciousness was an inner space providing a point of contact between the real human being and the ideal one inside, the only space in which you could be together with God even before death. From the time of René Descartes (1596-1650), however, the philosophical interpretation of conscientia simply as higher-order knowledge of mental states began to predominate.

It has to do with certainty; in an important sense, consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.

The second important insight seems to be the notion of integration: Consciousness is what binds things together into a ...

If we have this whole, then a world a...

If the information flow from your sensory organs is unified, you experience the world. If your senses come...

Today it is interesting to note that the first essential insight—knowing that you know something—is mainly discussed in philosophy of mind,2 whereas the neuroscience of consciousness focuses on the problem of integration: how the features of objects are bound together.

The latter phenomenon—the One-World Problem of dynamic, global integration—is what we must examine if we want to understand the unity of consciousness.

But in the process we may discover how both these essential questions—the top-down version discussed in philosophy of mind and the bottom-up version discussed in the...

What would it be like to have the experience of living in many worlds at the same time, of genuine parallel realities opening up in your mind?...

The One-World Problem is so simple that it is easily overlooked: In order for a world to appear to us,...

Our tunnel is one tunnel; there are no back alleys, side streets, or alternative routes.

Only people who have suffered severe psychiatric disorders or have experimented with major doses of hallucinogens can perhaps conceive of what it means to live in more than one tunnel at a time.

But the problem of integration has to be solved on several subglobal levels first.

Imagine you are no longer able to bind the various features of a seen object—its color, surface texture, edges, and so on—into a single entity.

In a disorder known as apperceptive agnosia, no coherent visual model emerges on the level of conscious experience, despite the fact that all the patien...

A number of new ideas and hypotheses in the neurosciences suggest how this “world-binding” function works. One such is the dynamical core hypothesis,5 which posits that a highly integrated and internally differentiated neurodynamic pattern emerges from the constant background chatter of millions of neurons incessantly firing away.

Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a leading advocate of this hypothesis, speaks of a “functional cluster” of neurons, whereas I have coined the concept of causal density.