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

by Thomas Metzinger

We experience succession: of the notes in a piece of music, of two thoughts drifting by in our...

We experience duration: A musical tone or an emotion may stay...

individual thoughts can form more complex conscious experiences, which may be described as unfolding patterns of reasoning.

By the way, there is an upper limit to what you can consciously experience as taking place in a single moment: It is almost impossible to experience a musical motif, a rhythmic piece of poetry, or a complex thought that lasts for more than three seconds as a unified temporal gestalt.

Presence is a necessary condition for conscious experience.

If the brain could solve the One-World Problem but not the Now Problem, a world could not appear to you. In a deep sense, appearance is simply presence, and the subjective sense of temporal immediacy is the definition of an internal space of time.

Is it possible to transcend this subjective Now-ness, to escape the tunnel of presence? Imagine you are lost in a daydream. Completely. Your conscious mind is n...

But what actually happens at the moment you fully lose contact with your present surroundings, say, in a manifest daydream? You are suddenly somewhere else. Another lived Now emerges in your mind. Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness.

And, of course, it is an illusion. As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time.

strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

At this point, it becomes clear why philosophers speak about “phenomenal” consciousness or “phenomenal” experience. A phenomenon is an appearance. The phenomenal Now is the appearance of a Now.

Nature optimized our time experience over the last couple of millions of years so that we experience something as taking place now because this arrangement is functional...

But from a more rigorous, philosophical point of view, the temporal inwardness of the conscious Now is an illusion. There is...

This point gives us a second fundamental insight into the tunnel-like nature of consciousness: The sense of presence is an internal p...

The physical universe does not know what William James called the “specious present,” nor does it know an expanded, or “smeared,” present moment.

The brain is an exception: For certain physical organisms, such as us, it has proved viable to represent the path through reality as if there were an extended present, a chain of individual moments through which we live our lives.

The Ego Tunnel is just the opposite of a God’s-eye view of the world. It has a Now, a Here—and a Me, being there now.

The moving window of the conscious Now, though, has proved functionally advantageous for creatures like us: It successfully bundles perception, cognition, and conscious will in a way that selects just the right parameters of interaction with the physical world, in environments like those in which our ancestors fought for survival.

What we experience as the present moment embodies implicit knowledge about how we can integrate our sensory perceptions with our motor behavior in a fluid and adaptive manner. However, this type of knowledge applies only to the kind of environment we found on the surface of this planet.

Other conscious beings, in other parts of the universe, might have evolved completely different forms of time experience.

They might be frozen into an eternal Now or have a fantastically high resolution, living for only a few of our Earth minutes and experiencing more intense individual moments than a million human beings experience in a lifetime. They could be m...

A good (and more difficult) question is how much room for variation there is in terms of ...

If my argument is sound, conscious minds can be situated only in one single, real Now at a time—because this is one of the e...

Is it logically possible to live in two or more absolutely equivalent Nows at the same time, to have a subjective perspective originating from multiple points in the temporal order? I don’t think so, because there would no lon...

Moreover, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which experiencing multiple lived presents...

Even given a radically materialist view of mind and consciousness, one must concede that there is a complex physical property that (as far as we know) exists only in biological nervous systems on this planet.

This new property is a virtual window of presence, and it is implemented in the brains of vertebrates and particularly of higher mammals.

The physical passage of time existed before this property emerged, but then something new was added—a representation of time, including an illusory, smeared present, plus the fact that the beings harboring this new property in their brains could not recognize it as a representation. Billions of conscious...

At this point, we also touch on a deeper and more general principle running through modern research on consciousness. The more aspects of subjective experience we can explain in a hardheaded, materialistic manner, the more our view of wh...

Very obviously, and in a strictly no-nonsense, non-metaphorical, and nonmysterious way, the physical universe itself possesses an intrinsic potential for the emergence of subjectivity. Crude versions of objectivi...

THE REALITY PROBLEM: HOW YOU WERE BORN AS ...

Minimal consciousness is the appearan...

However, if we solve the One-World Problem and the Now Problem, all we have is a model of a unified world and a model o...

We have a representation of a single world and a representation...

Clearly, the appearance of a world is somet...

Imagine you could suddenly apprehend the whole world, your own body, the book in your hands, and all of your current surroundings as a “mental model.”...

Now, try to imagine something even more difficult: The robust sense of presence you are enjoying right now is itself only a special kind of image. It is a time representati...

What would happen if you could distance yourself from the current moment—if the Now-ness of this current moment turned out not to be the real Now but only an elegant portrait of pre...

The pivotal question is how to get from a world-model and a Now-model to exactly what you have as you are readin...

The answer lies in the transparency of phenomenal representations. Recall that a representation is transparent if the system using it ca...

A model of the current moment is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is simply the result of information-processing currently going on in itself.

Visual attention cannot dissolve the fluidity, the continuity, of your book experience as it can discover the individual pixels when you take a closer look at the TV screen.

The blinding speed with which your brain activates the visual model of the book and integrates it with the tactile sensations in your fingers is simply too fast.

One might argue that this disparity exists because the system creating the “pixels” is also th...

Of course, in the continuous flow of information-processing in the brain, nothing l...

Still, could your inability to break the book percept down into pixels be caused by something other than the sp...

If your brain worked much more slowly (say, if it could detect time spans of a year but no briefer), you still wouldn’t be able to detect those “pixels.” You would still perceive a seamless passage of time, because the conscious working of our brain is not a single uniform event but a multilayered chain of eve...

The brain creates what are called higher-order ...

If you attend to your perception of a visual object (such as this book), then there is at least one second-order process (i.e., attentional processing) taking a first-order process—in this case, visual perception—as its object. If the first-order process—the process creating the seen object, the book in your hands—integrates its information in a smaller time-window than the second-order process (namely, the attention you’re directing at this new inner model), then the integration process on the first-order level will itself become transparent, in the sense that you cannot consciously experience it.

Important, orders of processes in brain.

Just as swiftly and effortlessly, the book-model is bound with other models, such as the models of your hands and of the desk, and seamlessly integrated into your overall conscious space of experience. Because it has been optimized over millions of years, this mechanism is so fast and so reliable that you never notice its existence. It makes your brain invisible to itself. You are in contact only with its content; you never see the representation as such; therefore, you have the illusion of being directly in contact with the world. And that is how you become a naïve realist, a person who thinks she is in touch with an observer-independent reality.