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Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.
By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego. It is the origin of what philosophers often call the first-person perspective. We are not in direct contact with outside reality or with ourselves, but we do have an inner perspective. We can use the word “I.” We live our conscious lives in the Ego Tunnel.
What exactly is it that is reading these lines right now?
Consciousness is the appearance of a world. The essence of the phenomenon of conscious experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: If you are conscious, a world appears to you. This is true in dreams as well as in the waking state, but in dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist.
Frequently, a deeper, unarticulated insight may lie behind our uneasiness with reductive approaches to the conscious mind. We know that our beliefs about consciousness can subtly change what we perceive, influencing the very contents and functional profile of subjective experience itself. Some fear that a materialistic disenchantment, along with advances in the sciences of the mind, may have unwanted social and cultural consequences.
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 based on a globally integrated data format.
But 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.7
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 masters of boredom, subjects of an extremely slow passage of time. A good (and more difficult) question is how much room for variation there is in terms of subjective time experience.
Conscious information is exactly that set of information currently active in our brains to which we can deliberately direct our high-level attention.
As long as nothing goes wrong, naive realism makes for a very relaxed way of living.
From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains.
Billions of years later, nervous systems were able to represent this self/world distinction on a higher level—for instance, as body boundaries delineated by an integrated but as yet unconscious body schema. 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.
Your bodily self-model is created by a process of multisensory integration, based on a simple statistical correlation your brain has discovered.
Another reason the OBE is interesting from a philosophical perspective is that it is the best known state of consciousness in which two self-models are active at the same time.
We know more: A seeing self also is not necessary. You can shut the windows in front of the little man behind your eyes by closing your eyelids. The seeing self disappears; the Ego remains. You can be a robust, conscious self even if you are emotionally flat, if you do not engage in acts of will, and also in the absence of thought.
But in fact the conscious experience of intention is just a sliver of a complicated process in the brain. And since this fact does not appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains from the mental into the physical realm.
Our brain does not simply register a chair, a teacup, an apple; it immediately represents the seen object as what I could do with it—as an affordance, a set of possible behaviors.
Everything we perceive is automatically portrayed as a factor in a possible interaction between ourselves and the world.
We use our own “motor ideas” to understand someone else’s actions by directly mapping them onto our own inner repertoire, by automatically triggering an inner image of what our goal would be if our body also moved that way.
If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego and a naive realist about whatever its self-model says it is. The phenomenal property of selfhood will be exemplified in the artificial system, and it will appear to itself not only as being someone but also as being there. It will believe in itself.
The story of the first artificial Ego Machines, those postbiotic phenomenal selves with no civil rights and no lobby in any ethics committee, nicely illustrates how the capacity for suffering emerges along with the phenomenal Ego; suffering starts in the Ego Tunnel.
In the same sense, all sentient beings capable of suffering should constitute a solidarity against suffering.
We are Ego Machines, natural information-processing systems that arose in the process of biological evolution on this planet. The Ego is a tool—one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behavior and understanding the behavior of others. We each live our conscious life in our own Ego Tunnel, lacking direct contact with outside reality but possessing an inward, first-person perspective. We each have conscious self-models—integrated images of ourselves as a whole, which are firmly anchored in background emotions and physical sensations.
At the very moment we wake up in the morning, the physical system—that is, ourselves—starts the process of “selfing.” A new chain of conscious events begins; once again, on a higher level of complexity, the life process comes to itself.
This may also be the core of the puzzle of consciousness: We sense that its solution is radically counterintuitive. The bigger picture cannot be properly reflected in the Ego Tunnel—it would dissolve the tunnel itself. Put differently, if we wanted to experience this theory as true, we could do so only by radically transforming our state of consciousness.
Metaphorically, the central claim of this book is that as you were reading these last several paragraphs, you—the organism as a whole—were continuously mistaking yourself for the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.
Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self.
The world evolved world-modelers. Parts began to mirror the whole. Billions of conscious brains are like billions of eyes, with which the universe can look at itself as being present.
The amount of possible neurophenomenological configurations of an individual human brain, the variety of possible tunnels, is so large that you can explore only a tiny fraction of them in your lifetime. Nevertheless, your individuality, the uniqueness of your mental life, has much to do with which trajectory through phenomenal-state space you choose. Nobody will ever live this conscious life again.
Perhaps they will have their temporal lobes tickled on street corners, or abandon their churches and synagogues and mosques in favor of new Centers for Transpersonal Hedonic Engineering and Metaphysical Tunnel Design.
Recall Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Should these experiences count as an empty form of hedonism, or do they belong to the “epistemic” form of happiness grounded in insight? Indeed, do they possess any value for society as a whole?
