|
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...
To the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible 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 subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences.
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 is doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts? Why is your conscious reality you are conscious reality?
This is the heart of the mystery. If we want not just the building blocks of a unified whole, these are the essential questions. There is a news story, a provocative and perhaps shocking one, to be told about this mystery: it is the story of the Ego Tunnel.
3
The phenomenal Self Model
Before I introduce the Ego Tunnel, the central metaphor that will guide the discussion from here onward, it will be helpful to consider … the purely experiential nature of the self. ..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 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.
4
The PSM of Homo sapiens is probably one of nature's best inventions. It is an efficient way to allow a biological organism to consciously conceive of itself and others as a whole. Thus it enables the organism to interact with its internal world as well as with the external environment in an intelligent and holistic manner. Most animals are conscious to one degree or another, their PSM is not the same as ours.
Our evolved type of conscious self model is unique to the human brain, in that by representing the process of representation in itself, we can catch ourselves - Antonio Damasio would call it - in the act of knowing.
We mentally represent ourselves as representational systems, in phenomenological real-time. This ability turned us into thinkers of thoughts and readers of minds, and it allowed biological evolution to explode into a cultural evolution.
The ego is an extremely useful instrument - one that has helped us to understand one another through empathy and mind reading. Finally, by allowing us to externalize our minds through cooperation and culture, the ego has enabled us to form complex societies.
6
I use one central metaphor of conscious experience: the “Ego Tunnel”. Conscious experience is like a tunnel. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal constructed but also an extremely selective way of representing information. 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 us 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 depths. Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality. Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious.
7
First, our brains generate a world simulation, so perfect that we do not recognise it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate in in an image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body on our psychological states are all so our relationship to the past and the future, as well as to other conscious beings. The internal image of the person as a whole is the phenomenal Ego, the “I” or the “Self” as it appears in conscious experience; therefore, I use the term is phenomenal ego and phenomenal self interchangeably.
The phenomenal ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head of the content of an inner image - namely, the conscious self model, or PSM. By placing the self model within the world model, a centre is created. That centre 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.
In the ordinary states of consciousness, there is always someone having the experience - someone consciously experiencing himself as directed toward the world, as a self in the act of attending, knowing, designing, willing, and acting. There are two major reasons for this. First, we possess an integrated inner image of ourselves that is firmly anchored in our feelings and bodily sensations; the world simulation created by our brains includes the experience of a point of view. Second, we are unable to experience and introspectively recognise our self models as models. Much of the self model is, as philosophers might say, transparent.
Transparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us. We do not see the window but only the birds flying by. We do not see new and is firing away in our brain but only what they represent for us. Conscious world model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model - we look right through it, directly onto the world, as it were. The central claim of this book - is that the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large part of the PSM in our brain is transparent.
8
The ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM at this moment. But it can become the ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realise that all this is just the content of simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but the image of reality - and a very special one indeed. The ego is a transparent mental image: you - the physical person as a whole - look right through it. You will not see it. But you see with it. The ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behaviour and for understanding the behaviour of others. Whenever the organism needs this tool, the brain activates the PSM.
9
We don't create an individual world but only a world model. Moreover, the whole idea of potentially being directly in touch with reality is a sort of romantic folklore; we know the world only by using representations, because correctly representing something is what knowing is.
Knowledge is possible through the cooperation and communication of large groups of people.
11
One way of looking at the Ego Tunnel is as complex property of the global neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). The NCC is that set of newer functional properties in your brain sufficient to bring about a conscious experience.
Why is consciousness subjective? The most important question I seek to answer is why a conscious world model almost invariably has a centre: then me, and ego, and experiencing self stop what exactly is the cells that has the rubber hand illusion? What exactly is it that are permanently leaves the physical body in a OBE.
In Ego Tunnel is a consciousness tunnel that has evolved the additional property of creating a robust first person perspective, a subjective view of the world. It is a consciousness tunnel plus an apparent self. We need to know how a genuine sense of self would appear.
Thomas Metzinger The Ego Tunnel
|