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

by Thomas Metzinger

The basic idea is simple: The global neural correlate of consciousness is like an island emerging from the sea—as noted, it is a large set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole, underpinning your experiential model of the world in its totality at any given moment.

The global NCC has many different levels of description: Dynamically, we can describe it as a coherent island, made of densely coupled relations of cause and effect, emerging from the waters of a much less coherent flow of neural activity.

Or we could adopt a neurocomputational perspective and look at the global NCC as something that results from information-processing in the brain and he...

Whatever information is within this cloud of firing neurons is conscious information.

Whatever is within the cloud’s boundary (the “dynamical core”) is part of our inner world; whatever is outside of it is not part of our subjective reality.

Conscious experience can thus be seen as a special global property of the overall neural dynamics of your brain, a special form of information-processing ...

What does all this mean? What we want for consciousness is not a uniform state of global synchrony, a state in which many nerve cells simply fire together simultaneously.

We find such uniformity in states of unconsciousness such as deep sleep and during epileptic seizures; in these cases, the synchrony wipes out all the internal complexity: It is as if the synchrony had glossed over all the colors and shapes, the objects making up our world.

We want large-scale coherence spanning many areas of the brain and flexibly binding many different contents into a conscious hierarchy: the letters into the page, the page into the book, the hand holding the book into your bodily self, and the...

We want a unity of consciousness that—internally—is as differe...

On the other hand, maximal differentiation is not optimal, either, because then our world would fall apart into unconnected pieces of mental ...

The trick with consciousness is to achieve just the right trade-off between the parts and the whole—and at any single moment a widely distributed network of neurons in the brain seems to achieve just that, as a cloud of single nerve cells, dispersed in space, fire away in intricate patterns of...

Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events.

As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.

when you move into deep sleep and the island dissolves back into the sea, your world disappears as well. We humans have known this since Greek antiquity: Sleep is the little brother of death; it means letting go of the world.

Aristotle and Franz Brentano alike pointed out that consciously perceiving must also mean being aware of the fact that one is consciously perceiving, right now, at this very moment.

If this idea is true, the brain state creating your conscious perception of the book in your hand right now must have two logical parts: one portraying the book and one continuously representing the state itself.

Conscious states could be exactly those states that “metarepresent” themselves while re...

If we apply this idea not to single representations, such as the visual experience of an apple in your hand, but to the brain’s unified portrait of the world as a whole, then the dynamic flow of conscious experience appears as the result of a continuous large-scale application of the brain’s prior knowledge to the current situation.

If you are conscious, the overall process of perceiving, learning, and living creates a context for itself—and that is how your reality turns into a lived reality.

Another fascinating scientific route into the One-World Problem is increasingly receiving attention. It has long been known that in deep meditation the experience of unity a...

Thus, if we want to know what consciousness is, why not consult those people who cultiv...

Or even better, why not use our modern neuroimaging techniques to look directly into their brains while they maximize th...

Antoine Lutz and his colleagues at the W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin studied Tibetan monks who had experie...

They found that meditators self-induce sustained high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and global phase-synchrony, visible in EEG recordings made while they are meditating.9 The high-amplitude gamma activity found in some of these meditators seems to be the str...

As Wolf Singer and his coworkers have shown, gamma-band oscillations, caused by groups of neurons firing away in synchrony about forty times per second, are one of our best current candidates for creating unity and wholeness (although t...

For example, on the level of conscious object-perception, these synchronous oscillations often seem to be what makes an object’s various features—the edges, color, and surface texture of...

The synchrony of neural responses also plays a decisive role in figure-background segregation—that is, the pop-out effect that lets us perceive an object against a background, allowing a new gestalt to emerge from the perceptual scene.

Ulrich Ott

He confronted me with an intriguing idea: Could deep meditation be the process, perhaps the only process, in which human beings can sometimes turn the global background into the gestalt, the dominating feature of consciousness itself?

This assumption would fit in nicely with an intuition held by many, among others Antoine Lutz, namely that the fundamental subject/object structure of experience can be transcended in states of this kind.

Interestingly, this high-amplitude oscillatory activity in the brains of experienced meditators emerges over several dozens of seconds. They can’t just switch it on; instead, it begins to unfold only when the meditator manages effortlessly to “step out of the way.” The full-blown meditative state emerges only slowly, but this is exactly what the theory predicts: As a gigantic network phenomenon, the level of neural synchronization underlying the unity of consciousness will require more time to develop, because the amount of time required to achieve synchronizati...

The oscillations also correlate with the meditators’ verbal reports of the intensity of the meditative experience—that is, oscillations are d...

Another interesting finding is that there are significant postmeditative changes to the baseline activity of the brain. Apparently, repeated meditative practice ...

If meditation is seen as a form of mental training, it turns out that oscillatory synchrony in the gamma range opens just the right time window that would be nece...

The unity of consciousness is thus seen to be a dynamic property of the human brain.

But the next problem in formulating a complete theory of consciousness is more difficult.

THE NOW PROBLEM: A LIVED MOMENT EMERGES

Here is something that, as a philosopher, I have always found both fascinating and deeply puzzling: A complete scientific description of the physical universe would not co...

Indeed, such a description would be free of what philosophers call “indexical terms.” There would be no pointers or little red arrows to tell you “You are here!” or “Right now!” In real life, this is the job of the conscious brain: It constantly tells the organism harboring it what place is here and what time is now. Th...

The biological consciousness tunnel is not a tunnel only in the simple sense of being an internal model of reality in your brain. It is also a time tunnel—or, more precisely, a tunnel of presence. Here we encounter a subtler form of inwardness—namel...

The truly vexing aspect of the Now Problem is conceptual: It is very hard to say what exactly the puzzle consists of. At this point, philosophers and scientists alike typically quote a passage from the fourteenth chapter of the eleventh book of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Here the Bishop of Hippo famously notes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

Let me try: Consciousness is inwardness in time. It makes the world present for you by creating a new space in your mind—the space of temporal internality. Everything is in the Now. Whatever you experience, you experience it as happening at this moment.

One essential function of consciousness is to help an organism stay in touch with the immediate present—with all those properties in both itself and the environment that may change fast and unpredictably.

You require a conscious representation only if you do not know exactly what will happen next and which capacities (attention, cognition, memory, motor control) you will need to react properly to the challenge around the corner.

This critical information must remain active so that different modules or brain mechanisms can access it simultaneously.

My idea is that this simultaneity is precisely why we need...

In order to effect this, our brains learned to simulate temporal internality. In order to create a common platform—a blackboard on which messages to our various specialized brain areas can be posted—we need a common frame ...

The past is outside-time, as is the future. But there is also inside-time, this time, the Now, the moment you’re currently living. All your conscious thoughts and feelings take place in this lived moment.

How are we going to find this special form of inwardness in the biological brain? Of course, conscious time experience has other elements. We experience simultaneity. (And have you ever noticed that you cannot will two different actions at the same moment or simultaneously make two decisions?)