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Metzinger-ego207
We are Ego Machines, natural information processing systems that arose in the process of biological evolution on this planet. The Ego is the tool - one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behaviour and understanding the behaviour 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. Therefore, the world simulation constantly being created by our brains is built around the centre. But we are unable to experience it as such, or our self- models as models. The Ego tunnel gives you the robust feeling of being in direct contact with the outside world by simultaneously generating an ongoing “out-of-brain experience” and a sense of immediate contact with your “self”. The conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large portion of the self-model in your brain is, as philosophers would say, transparent.
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We are Ego machines, but we do not have selves. We cannot leave the Ego tunnel, because there is nobody who could leave. The Ego and its tunnel are representational phenomena: They are just one of many possible ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world, and the Ego merely a complex physical event - an activation pattern in your central nervous system.
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You - the organism as a whole - are continuously mistaking yourself for the content of the self-model currently activated in your brain. But whereas the Ego is only an appearance, it may be false to say that it is an illusion. All of this is happening on a very basic level in our brains (philosophers call this level of information processing “ subpersonal”; computer scientists call it “subsymbolic”).
On this fundamental level, which forms the preconditions of knowing something, truth and falsity do not yet exist, nor is there an entity who could have the illusion of a self. In this ongoing process on the subpersonal level, there is no agent - no evil daemon that could count as creator of an illusion. And there is no entity that could count as subject of the illusion either. There is nobody in the system who could be mistaken or confused about anything - the homunculus does not exist. We have only the dynamical self-organisation of a new coherent structure - namely, the transparent self-model in the brain - and this is what it means to be no one and Ego machine at the same time. In sum and on the level of phenomenology as well is on the level of neurology, the conscious self is neither a form of knowledge nor an illusion. It just is what it is.
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The Ego evolved as an instrument in social cognition, and one of its greatest functional advantages was that it allowed us to read the minds of other animals or conspecifics - and then to deceive them. Or deceive ourselves. Since our inbuilt existential need for full emotional and physical security can never be fulfilled, we have a strong drive toward delusion and bizarre belief systems.
Psychological evolution endowed us with the irresistible urge to satisfy our emotional need for stability and emotional meaningfulness by creating metaphysical worlds and invisible persons. Whereas spirituality might be defined as seeing what is - as letting go of the search for emotional security - religious faith can be seen as an attempt to cling to that search by redesigning the Ego tunnel. Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning and embed it in a positive meta-context - it is the deeply human attempt to finally feel at home.
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The current explosion of knowledge in the empirical mindsciences is completely uncontrolled, with a multilevel dynamic of its own, and its speed is increasing. It is also unfolding in an ethical vacuum, driven solely by individual career interests and are uninfluenced by political considerations…
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We will now have to assume that the universe has an intrinsic potential for subjectivity. We will suddenly understand that the physical universe evolved not only life and biological organisms with nervous systems but also consciousness, world models, and robust first person perspectives, thereby opening the door to what might be called the social universe: to high-level symbolic communication, to the evolution of ideas.
We are special. We manifest a significant phase transition. We brought a strong form of sujectivity into the physical universe - a form of subjectivity mediated by concepts and theories.
In the extremely limited part of reality known to us, we are the only sentient creatures for whom the sheer fact of our individual existence poses a theoretical problem. We invented philosophy and science and started an open-ended process of gaining self-reflective knowledge. That is to say, we are purely physical beings whose representational capacities have become so strong that they allowed us to form scientific communities and intellectual traditions. Because our subsymbolic, transparent-self model functions as an anchor for our opaque, cognitive Ego, we were able to become thinkers of thoughts. We were able to cooperate in constructing abstract entities that move through time and are constantly optimised. We call these entities theories.
Now we are now we are entering an unprecedented stage: Centuries philosophical searching for a theory of consciousness have culminated in a rigourous empirical project that is progressing incrementally and in a sustainable manner. This process is recursive, in that it will also change the contents and the functional structure of our self-models. This fact tells us something about the physical universe in which all these events are occurring: The universe has the potential not only for the self-organisation of life and evolution of strong subjectivity but also for an even higher level of complexity. I will not go so far as to say that in us the physical universe becomes conscious of itself. Nevertheless, the emergence of coherent conscious reality-models in biological nervous systems created a new form of self-similarity within the physical universe. The world evolved world-modellers. 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.
Thomas Metzinger
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