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EGO TUNNEL 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page Ii 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page i THE EGO TUNNEL 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page ii This page intentionally left blank 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page iii The Ego Tunnel the science of the mind and the myth of the self Thomas Metzinger A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP New York 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page iv Copyright © 2009 by Thomas Metzinger Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Set in 10.75 point Warnock Pro by the Perseus Books Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Metzinger, Thomas, 1958- The ego tunnel : the science of the mind and the myth of the self / Thomas Metzinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-465-04567-9 (alk. paper) 1. Consciousness. I. Title. BF311.M47 2009 126—dc22 2008044399 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page v To Anja and my family 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page vi Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive. —daniel c. dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA 1987, p. 6) He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” —elizabeth anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London 1959, p. 151) 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page vii CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART ONE THE CONSCIOUSNESS PROBLEM 1 The Appearance of a World 15 2 A Tour of the Tunnel 25 The Unity of Consciousness 66 PART TWO IDEAS AND DISCOVERIES 3 Out of the Body and into the Mind: Body Image, Out-of-Body Experiences, and the Virtual Self 75 4 From Ownership to Agency to Free Will 115 5 Philosophical Psychonautics: What Can We Learn from Lucid Dreaming? 133 Dreaming 149 vii 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page viii viii Contents 6 The Empathic Ego 163 The Shared Manifold 174 PART THREE THE CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION 7 Artificial Ego Machines 187 8 Consciousness Technologies and the Image of Humankind 207 9 A New Kind of Ethics 219 Notes 241 Index 261 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has not been written for philosophers or scientists. Instead, it is my first attempt to introduce a wider public to what I think are the truly important issues in consciousness research today. The selection of relevant philosophical issues and new empirical insights is entirely my own—and of course hopelessly incomplete and necessarily superfi- cial. But I do hope this book will give interested lay readers a realistic view of the picture of self-consciousness and the human mind now emerging—and of the accompanying challenges all of us will have to face in the future. Of the many people who have supported me in this project, my first thanks go to Jennifer Windt, who has spent countless hours helping me with the English version. I have learned a great deal from her. It is diffi- cult to write a nonacademic book in a language other than your own, and if I have at least partly succeeded, it is due to her accuracy, consci- entiousness, and reliability. I then found a superbly professional editor in Sara Lippincott. I am deeply indebted to both of them. Among the many colleagues who have supported me, I am particularly grateful to Susan Blackmore, Olaf Blanke, Peter Brugger, Daniel Dennett, Vittorio Gallese, Allan Hobson, Victor Lamme, Bigna Lenggenhager, Antoine Lutz, Angelo Maravita, Wolf Singer, Tej Tadi, and Giulio Tononi. This work was in part supported by the COGITO Foundation (Switzerland), the DISCOS Project (“Disorders and Coherence of the Embodied Self,” ix 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page x x Acknowledgments an EU Marie Curie Research Training Network), and a Fellowship at Eu- rope’s best Institute for Advanced Research, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Thomas Metzinger January 2009 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page 1 INTRODUCTION In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self. But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cogni- tive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self. It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness—that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object—if we don’t come to terms with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisi- ble entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a sub- jective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences? There are other important issues in the quest to probe our inner nature—new, exciting theories about emotions, empathy, dreaming, ra- tionality, recent discoveries about free will and the conscious control of our actions, even about machine consciousness—and they are all valu- able, as the building blocks of a deeper understanding of ourselves. I will touch on many of them in this book. What we currently lack, however, is the big picture—a more general framework we can work with. The new mind sciences have generated a flood of relevant data but no model that can, at least in principle, integrate all these data. There is one cen- tral question we have to confront head on: Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is 1 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page 2 2 THE EGO TUNNEL the entity thinking your thoughts? Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality? This is the heart of the mystery. If we want not just the building blocks but a unified whole, these are the essential questions. There is a new story, a provocative and perhaps shocking one, to be told about this mystery: It is the story of the Ego Tunnel. The person telling you this story is a philosopher, but one who has closely cooperated with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and re- searchers in artificial intelligence for many years. Unlike many of my philosopher colleagues, I think that empirical data are often directly rele- vant to philosophical issues and that a considerable part of academic phi- losophy has ignored such data for much too long. The best philosophers in the field clearly are analytical philosophers, those in the tradition of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein: In the past fifty years, the strongest contributions have come from analytical philosophers of mind. However, a second aspect has been neglected too much: phenomenology, the fine-grained and careful description of inner experience as such. In particular, altered states of consciousness (such as meditation, lucid dreaming, or out-of-body experiences) and psychiatric syndromes (such as schizophrenia or Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients may actually believe they do not exist) should not be philosophical taboo zones. Quite the contrary: If we pay more attention to the wealth and the depth of conscious experience, if we are not afraid to take consciousness seriously in all of its subtle variations and borderline cases, then we may discover exactly those conceptual insights we need for the big picture. In the chapters that follow, I will lead you through the ongoing Con- sciousness Revolution. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce basic ideas of con- sciousness research and the inner landscape of the Ego Tunnel. Chapter 3 examines out-of-body experiences, virtual bodies, and phantom limbs. Chapter 4 deals with ownership, agency, and free will; chapter 5 with dreams and lucid dreaming; chapter 6 with empathy and mirror neu- rons; and chapter 7 with artificial consciousness and the possibility of postbiotic Ego Machines. All these considerations will help us to further map out the Ego Tunnel. The two final chapters address some of the consequences of these new scientific insights into the nature of the con- 0465045679-Metzinger:Layout 1 2/3/09 9:28 AM Page 3 Introduction 3 scious mind-brain: the ethical challenges they pose and the social and cultural changes they may produce (and sooner than we think), given the naturalistic turn in the image of humankind.
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