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

by Thomas Metzinger

Discovering the global NCC means discovering how these functions are implemented in the nervous system. This would also allow us to decide which other beings on this planet enjoy the appearance of a world; these beings will have a recognizable physical counterpart in their brains.

On the most simple and fundamental level, the global NCC will be a dynamic brain state exhibi...

It will be fully integrated with whatever generates the virtual window of presence, because i...

Finally, it will have to make earlier processing stages unavailable to...

I predict that by 2050 we will have found the GNCC, the global neural correlate of consciousness. But I also predict that in the process we will discover a series of techn...

THE INEFFABILITY PROBLEM: WHAT WE WILL NEVER BE A...

The contents of consciousness can be ineffable in many different ways. You cannot explain to a blind man the redness of a rose. If the linguistic community you live in does not have a concept for a particular feeling, you may not be able to discover it in yourself or name it so as to share it with others.

A third type of ineffability is formed by all those conscious states (“conscious” because they could in principle be attended to) so fleeting you cannot form a memory trace of them: brief flickers on the fringe of your subjective awareness—perhaps a hardly detectable color change or a mild fluctuation in some emotion, or a barely noticeable glimmer in the mélange of your bodily sensations.

There might even be longer episodes of conscious experience—during the dream state, say, or under anesthesia—that are systematically unavailable to memory systems in the b...

Maybe this is also true of the very last moments before death. Here, however, I’m offering a clearer and better-defined example of ineffability...

Technically, this means we do not possess introspective identity criteria for many of the simplest states of consciousness.

Thus, in a simple, well-defined way, there is an element of ineffability in sensory consciousness: You can experience a myriad of things in all their glory and subtlety without having the means of reliably identifying them.

As a philosopher, I like these kinds of findings, because they elegantly demonstrate how subtle is the flow of conscious experience.

They show that there are innumerable things in life you can fathom only by experiencing them, that there is a depth in pure perception that cannot be grasped or invaded by thought or language.

The Ineffability Problem is a serious challenge for a scientific theory of consciousness—or at least for finding all its neural correlates. The problem is simply put: To pinpoint the minimally sufficient neural correlate of Green No. 24 in the brain, you must assume your subjects’ verbal reports are reliable—that they can correctly identify the phenomenal aspect of Green No. 24 over time, in repeated trials in a controlled experimental setting.

Once again, these empirical findings are philosophically relevant, because they redirect our attention to something we’ve known all along: Many things you can express by way of music (or other art forms, like dance) are ineffable, because they can never become the content of a mental concept or be put into words.

On the other hand, if this is so, sharing the ineffable aspects of our conscious lives becomes a dubious affair: We can never be sure if our communication was successful; there is no certainty about what actually it was we shared.

Remember, reduction is a relationship not between the phenomena themselves but between theories. T1 is reduced to T2.

One theory—say, about our subjective, conscious experience—is reduced to another—say, about large-scale dynamics in the brain.

Theories are built out of sentences and concepts. But if there are no concepts for certain objects in the domain of one theory, they cannot be mapped...

This is why it may be impossible to do what most hard scientists in consciousness research would like to do: show that Green No. 24 i...

What to do? If identification is not possible, elimination seems to be the only alternative. If the qualities of sensory consciousness cannot be turned into what philosophers call proper theoretical entities because we have no identity criteria for them, then the cleanest way of solving the Ineffability Problem may be to follow the path that neurophilosopher Pa...

Would the best solution be simply to say that by visually attending to this ineffable shade of Green No. 25 in front of us, we are already dir...

In this view, our experience of Green No. 25 would not be a conscious experience at all but instead something physical—a brain state.

For centuries, when speaking about “qualities” and color experiences, we were actually misdescribing states of our own bodies, internal states we never recognized as such—the walls of the Ego Tunnel.

I actually do like science fiction. This sci-fi scenario is conceivable, in principle. But are we willing to give up our authority over our own inner states—the authority allowing us to say that these two states must be the same because they feel the same? Are we willing to hand this epistemological authority over to the empirical sciences of the mind?

This is the core of the Ineffability Problem, and certainly many of us would not be ready to take the jump into a new system of description.

“Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”

Churchland has an original and refreshingly different perspective: If we just gave up the idea that we ever had anything like conscious minds in the first place and began to train our native mechanisms of introspection with the help of the new and much more fine-grained conceptual distinctions offered by neuroscience, then we would also discover much more, we would enrich our inner lives by becoming materialists.

“I suggest, then, that those of us who prize the flux and content of our subjective phenomenological experience need not view the advance of materialist neuroscience with fear an...

THE EVOLUTION PROBLEM: COULDN’T ALL OF THIS HAVE HAPPENED IN THE DARK?

The Evolution Problem is one of the most difficult problems for a theory of consciousness. Why, and in what sense, was it necessary to develop something like consciousness in the nervous systems of animals? Couldn’t zombies have evolved instead? Here, the answer is both yes and no.

As I noted in the Introduction, conscious experience is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon; it come...

There is a long history of consciousness on this planet. We have strong, converging evidence that all of Earth’s warm-blooded vertebrates (and probably certain o...

They may not have language and conceptual thought, but it is likely that they all have sensations and emotions.

They are clearly able to suffer. But since they do all this without verbal reports, it is almost impossible to investigate this issue more deeply.

What we must understand is how Homo sapiens managed to acquire—over the course of our biological history and individually as infants—this amazing property of living our lives in the...

First, let’s not forget that evolution is driven by chance, does not pursue a goal, and achieved what we now consider the continuous optimization of nervous systems in a blind process of hereditary variation and selection. It is incorrect to assume that evolution had to invent consciousness—in...

There is a consensus among many leading figures in the consciousness community that at least one of the central functions of phenomenal experience is making information “globally available” to an organism.

Part of Baars’s idea is that you become conscious of something only when you don’t know which of the tools in your mental toolbox you’ll have to use next.

Note that when you learn a difficult task for the first time, such as tying your shoes or riding a bicycle, your practicing is always conscious. It requires attention, and it takes up many of your resources. Yet as soon as you’ve mastered tying your shoes or riding a bicycle, you forget all about the learning process—to the point that it becomes difficult to teach the skill to your children.

There are many degrees of conscious experience, and the closer science looks, the more blurry the border between conscious and unconscious processing becomes.

Here is my part of the story: Consciousness is a new kind of organ.

Biological organisms evolved two different kinds of organs. One kind, such as the liver or the heart, forms part of an organism’s “hardware.” Organs of this type are permanently realized.

Then there are “virtual organs”—feelings (courage, anger, desire) and the phenomenal experience of seeing colored objects or hearing musi...

Now we can begin to see what the central evolutionary function of consciousness must have been: It makes classes of facts globally available for an organism and thereby allows it to attend to them, to think about them, and to react to them in a flexible manner that automatically takes the overall context into account.

You can discover that there are other people—other agents—in the environment and learn about your relationship to them; unless a certain type of conscious experience makes this fact globally available to you, you cannot cooperate with them, selectively imitate them, or learn from them in other ways. If you are smart, you may even begin to control their behavior by controlling their conscious states. If you successfully deceive them—if, say, you manage to install a false belief in their minds—then you have activated a virtual organ in another brain.

The interim conclusion is that making a world appear in an organism’s brain was a new computational strategy. Flagging the dangerous present world as real kept us from getting lost in our memories and our fantasies.

individual conscious experiences from the object level upward are virtual organs that transiently make knowledge available to you in an entirely new data format—the consciousness tunnel.

If a creature such as Homo sapiens evolves the additional ability to run offline simulations in its mind, then it can represent possible worlds—worlds that are not experienced as present.