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

by Thomas Metzinger

What you feel in the rubber-hand illusion is what I call the content of the phenomenal self-model (PSM)—the conscious model of the organism as a whole that is activated by the brain. (“Phenomenal” is used here, and throughout, in the philosophical sense, as pertaining to what is known purely experientially, through the way in which things subjectively appear to you.) The content of the PSM is the Ego.

This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. 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.

The most important question I seek to answer is why a conscious world-model almost invariably has a center: a me, an Ego, an experiencing self. What exactly is the self that has the rubber-hand illusion? What exactly is it that apparently leaves the physical body in an OBE? What exactly is it that is reading these lines right now?