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

by Thomas Metzinger

This species can have episodic memory. It can develop the ability to plan. It can ask itself, “How would a world look in which I had many children? What would the world be like if I were perfectly healthy? Or if I were rich and famous? And how can I make these things happen? Can I imagine a path leading from the present world into this imagined world?”

Such a being can also enjoy mental time travel, because it can switch back and forth between “inside-time” and “outside-time.” It can compare present experiences to past ones—but it can...

If it wants to use these new mental abilities properly, its brain must come up with a robust and reliable way to tell the difference ...

The being must stay anchored in the real world; if you lose yourself in daydreams, sooner or later another ani...

Therefore, you need a mechanism that reliably shows you the difference between the one real world and the many possible ones. And this trick must be achieved on the level of consciou...

As I discussed, conscious experience already is a simulation and never brings the subject of experience—you—into direct contact with reality. So the question is, How can you avoid get...

Transparency solved the problem of simulating a multitude of possible inner worlds without getting lost in them; it did so by allowing biological organisms to represent explicitly that one of those worlds is an actual reality. I call this the “world-zero hypothesis.”

Human beings know that some of their conscious experiences do not refer to the real world but are only representations in their minds.

Not only were we able to have conscious thoughts, but we could also experience them as thoughts, rather than hallucinating or getting lost in a fantasy. This ste...

It let us compare our memories and goals and plans with our present situation, and it helped us seek mental bridges from the ...

The distinction between things that only appear to us and real, objective facts became an element of our lived reality. (Please note that this is probably not...

By consciously experiencing some elements of our tunnel as mere images or thoughts about the world, we became aware of th...

The discovery of the appearance/reality distinction was possible because we realized that some of the content of our conscious minds is constructed internally and because we could introspectively apprehend the construction process. The technical term here would be phenomenal opacity—the opposite of transparency.

Those things in the evolution of consciousness that are old, ultrafast, and extremely reliable—such as the qualities of sensory experience—are transparent; abstract conscious thought is not.

From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually...

In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know ...

THE WHO PROBLEM: WHAT IS THE ENTITY THAT HAS CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE?

Consciousness is always bound to an individual first-person perspective; this is part of what makes it so elusive. It is a subjective phenomenon. Someone has it. In a deep and indisputable way, your inner world truly is not just someone’s inner world but your inner world—a private realm of experience that only you have direct access to.

To form a successful theory of consciousness, we must match first-person phenomenal content to third-person brain content.

We must somehow reconcile the inner perspective of the experiencing self with the outside perspective of science.

And there will always be many of us who intuitively think thi...

Many people think consciousness is ontologically irreducible (as philosophers say), because first-person facts cannot...

It is more likely, however, that consciousness is epistemically irreducible (as philosophers say). The idea is simple: One reality, one kind of fact, but two kinds of knowledge: f...

Even though consciousness is a physical process, these two different forms of knowin...

What is this mysterious first person? What does the word “I” refer to?

Is the existence of an experiencing self a necessary component of consciousness? I don’t think it is—for one thing, because there seem to be “self-less” forms of conscious experience.

In certain severe psychiatric disorders, such as Cotard’s syndrome, patients sometimes stop using the first-person pronoun and, moreover...

Mystics of all cultures and all times have reported deep spiritual experiences in which no “self ” was present, and some of them, too, stopped using the pronoun “I.”

Indeed, many of the simple organisms on this planet may have a consciousness tunnel with nobody living in it.

Perhaps some of them have only a consciousness “bubble” instead of a tunnel, because, together with the self, awareness of...

Human consciousness is characterized by various forms of inwardness, all of which influence one another: First, it is an internal process in the nervous system; second, it creates the experience of being in a world; third, the virtual window of presence gives us temporal internality, a Now.

But the deepest form of inwardness was the creation of an internal self/world border.

Conscious experience then elevated this fundamental strategy of partitioning reality to a previously unknown level of complexity and intelligence. The phenomenal self was born, and the conscious experience of being someone gradually emerged.

A self-model, an inner image of the organism as a whole, was built into the world-model, and this is how the consciously experienced first-person perspective developed.

We must understand how the consciousness tunnel turned into an Ego Tunnel.

CHAPTER TWO APPENDIX THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A CONVERSATION WITH WOLF SINGER

Wolf Singer is professor of neurophysiology and director of the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2004, he founded the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), which conducts basic theoretical research in various areas of science, bringing together theorists from the disciplines of biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics, and computer science.

His main research interest lies in understanding the neuronal processes underlying higher cognitive functions, such as visual perception, memory, and attention. He is also dedicated to making the results of brain research known to the general public and is a recipient of the Max Planck Prize for Public Science.

Singer: Since the discovery of synchronized oscillatory discharges in the visual cortex more than a decade ago, more and more evidence has supported the hypothesis that synchronization of oscillatory activity may be the mechanism for the binding of distributed brain processes—whereas the relevant oscillation frequencies differ for different structures and in the cerebral cortex typically cover the range of beta- and gamma-oscillations: 20 to 80 Hz.

What makes the synchronization phenomena particularly interesting in the present context is that they occur in association with a number of functions relevant for conscious experience.

finally, the oscillations are a distinctive correlate of conscious perception.

Metzinger: What is the evidence here?

Singer: Indeed, this would also account for the unity of consciousness—for the fact that the contents of phenomenal awareness, although they change from moment to moment, are always experienced as coherent.

Admittedly, the argument is somewhat circular, but if it is a necessary prerequisite for access to consciousness that activity be sufficiently synchronized across a sufficient number of processing regions, and if synchronization is equivalent with semantic binding, with integrating the meaning, it follows that the contents of consciousness can only be coherent.

Metzinger: What remains to be shown, if what you describe here turn...

Singer: Even if the proposed scenario turns out to be true, the question remains as to whether we have arrived at a satisfactory description of t...

Metzinger: In your field, what are the most urgent questions, and where is the field moving?

Singer: The most challenging questions are how information is encoded in distributed neuronal networks and how subjective feelings, the so-called qualia, emerge from distributed neuronal activity.

Conversely, cognitive neuroscience needs the humanities—for several reasons. First, progress in the neurosciences raises a large number of new ethical problems, and these need to be addressed not only by neurobiologists but also by representatives of the humanities.

Second, as neuroscience progresses, more and more phenomena that have traditionally been the subject of humanities research can be investigated with neuroscientific methods; thus, the humanities will provide the taxonomy and description of phenomena awaiting investigation at the neuronal level. Brain research begins with the analysis of such phenomena as empathy, jealousy, altruism, shared attention, and social imprinting—phenomena that have traditionally been described and analyzed by psychologists, sociologists, economists, and philosophers.