James Aitchison

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

Thomas Metzinger (2009)

In a paragraph

Conscious experience and the self are internal models, a virtual reality, the ego tunnel in which we live.  They have evolved as transparent, so we think they are real.  We should adopt the radical  view that we do not directly experience reality and do not have a self.

Key points

• There is no such thing as a self

• Conscious experience is an internal construct and a very selective way of representing information

• Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious. First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also 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 “self ” as it appears in conscious experience

• Nature’s virtual reality is conscious experience—a real-time world-model that can be viewed as a permanently running online simulation, allowing organisms to act and interact. It achieves the phenomenal properties of “presence” and “full immersion.”

• It is a particularly user-friendly interface, allowing a biological organism to direct its attention to a critical subset of its own global properties.

• The global model of reality constructed by our brain is updated at such great speed and with such reliability that we generally do not experience it as a model. It is the world we live in.

• Our theories about consciousness are as naive as the first ideas cavemen probably had about the true nature of the stars.

• Conscious experiences are full-blown mental models in the representational space opened up by the gigantic neural network in our heads—and because this space is generated by a person possessing a memory and moving forward in time, it is a tunnel.

• The central evolutionary function of consciousness is to make facts globally available for an organism and thereby allow it to attend to them, to think about them, and to react to them in a flexible manner that takes the overall context into account.

• Synchronization and resonance may account for the unity of consciousness

• The transparency of conscious experience is broken in the Rubber Hand illusion, Out of Body Experiences and Lucid Dreaming when the internal body image is separated from the actual body.

• Agency includes bodily agency, attentional agency, cognitive agency

• The subjective experience of free will is an ingenious neurocomputational tool, which creates an internal user-interface that allows the organism to control and adapt its behaviour and allows social interaction and cultural evolution.

• Mirror neurons and embodied simulation give an implicit bodily intersubjectivity, a shared manifold

• Until we become happier beings than our ancestors were, we should refrain from any attempt to impose our mental structure on artificial carrier systems.

• Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential conflict that makes us inherently religious

• A central question is: What is a good state of consciousness?

• Many fear that through the naturalistic turn in the image of mind, we will lose our dignity. Intellectual honesty and spirituality need to be reconciled.

Comments

The book is a sustained presentation of the view that consciousness and the self are internally constructed models rather than reality.  It includes discussion of supporting scientific evidence, and recognition of the radical nature of the conclusion.  Altogether, it is a strong statement of a position which I endorse, and which can be seen as one of philosophy’s clearest and most important conclusions.

There is an excellent episode of Sam Harris’s podcast featuring Thomas Metinger.  Metzinger’s views are similar to Anil Seth, as in my notes here. 

Notes from the book

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.

Phenomenal self-model (PSM)

our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information.

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. First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also 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 “self ” as it appears in conscious experience;

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 recognize our self-models as models; much of the self-model is, as philosophers might say, transparent.

subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world by letting it appear as if it were an Ego’s knowledge.

One way of looking at the Ego Tunnel is as a complex property of the global neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). The NCC is that set of neurofunctional properties in your brain sufficient to bring about a conscious experience.

An 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.

Consciousness is the appearance of a world. A robust phenomenon. Situates you in the world.

a complex phenomenon that comes in different flavors and strengths.

Our theories about consciousness are as naive as the first ideas cavemen probably had about the true nature of the stars.

Subjective color constancy is a fantastic feature of human color perception,

the process of conscious experience is just an idiosyncratic path through a physical reality so unimaginably complex and rich in information that it will always be hard to grasp just how reduced our subjective experience is. While we are drinking in all the colors, sounds, and smells—the diverse range of our emotions and sensory perceptions—it’s hard to believe that all of this is merely an internal shadow of something inconceivably richer. But it is.

Conscious experiences are full-blown mental models in the representational space opened up by the gigantic neural network in our heads—and because this space is generated by a person possessing a memory and moving forward in time, it is a tunnel.

the sense of being there is itself a simulation.

Etymology of consciousness with conscience.  Ideal observer in mind.

Higher order knowledge of mental states

Integration.  One-World with dynamic, global integration. Unity of consciousness a major achievement of brain. 

Synchrony of neural responses.

Strong sense of now.  Flagging the dangerous present.  Common frame of reference temporal. Extended present.

The sense of presence is an internal phenomenon, created by the human brain.

The Ego Tunnel has a Now, a Here—and a Me, being there now

Concept of metabolic price. any good theory of consciousness must reveal how it paid for itself. Transparent as meta-representations would not have been cost-efficient.

Born as naïve realists.

Walls of tunnel impenetrable as we can only experience it as given and not constructed.

the tunnel has a high-dimensional, multimodal surface.

we can simply enjoy conscious experience as an invisible interface to reality.

Cases where illusion breaks down, like cracked glass

If we can solve the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, and the Reality Problem, we can also find the global neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain.

Ineffability problem.

Now we can begin to see what the central evolutionary function of consciousness must have been: It makes classes of facts globally available for an organism and thereby allows it to attend to them, to think about them, and to react to them in a flexible manner that automatically takes the overall context into account.

Reality generation.  Represented as actual reality – world-zero hypothesis

Thinking is evolutionary recent and partly witnessed – seen as constructed, not fully transparent

Wolf Singer

consciousness requires that a sufficiently large number of processing areas—or in other words, a sufficient number of distributed computations—be bound by synchronization and that those coherent states be maintained over a sufficiently long period. Accounts for unity of consciousness

Body image, out of body experiences and the virtual self

Rubber hand illusion

OBEs and person experiences.  Extend to virtual OBEs.

Selfhood as embodiment and selfhood as subjectivity

Consciousness is the space of attentional agency.  We can control the focus of attention.

We live in a virtual world

Nature’s virtual reality is conscious experience—a real-time world-model that can be viewed as a permanently running online simulation, allowing organisms to act and interact. Millions of years ago, nature’s virtual reality achieved what today’s software engineers still strive for: the phenomenal properties of “presence” and “full immersion.”

Conscious experience, too, is an interface, an invisible, perfect internal medium allowing an organism to interact flexibly with itself.

It functions by creating an internal user interface—an “as if ” (that is, virtual) reality. It filters information, has a high bandwidth, is unambiguous and reliable, and generates a sense of presence. More important, it also generates a sense of self.

Controlling one’s body meant controlling one’s behavior and one’s perceptual machinery. But it also meant directing one’s thoughts and regulating one’s emotional states.

It is a particularly user-friendly interface, allowing a biological organism to direct its attention to a critical subset of its own global properties.

the conscious parts of our brains are like the body’s head-mounted display: They immerse the organisms in a simulated behavioral space.

Together, the embodied brain and the PSM, the phenomenal self-model, work much like a total flight simulator.

The global model of reality constructed by our brain is updated at such great speed and with such reliability that we generally do not experience it as a model. It is the world we live in. 

Forward simulations

Alien hand syndrome. 

A mind of its own.

Bodily agency, attentional agency, cognitive agency

They are the first link in the chain to cross the border from unconscious to conscious brain processes; you have the impression that they appeared in your mind “out of the blue,”

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.

see the subjective experience of free will as an ingenious neurocomputational tool. Not only does it create an internal user-interface that allows the organism to control and adapt its behavior, but it is also a necessary condition for social interaction and cultural evolution.

Neuroscientists underestimate the radical nature of their positions.

Lucid dreaming.

Allan Hobson

Dreams are the spandrals of sleep.

Improvements on Freud

Mirror neurons

Embodied simulation

Implicit bodily intersubjectivity

Affordances – what I can do with it

Vittorio Gallese

Shared manifold

First conscious machines suffering like retarded human infants

Or created to have good experiences.  Bliss machine. Life more than experiences, pleasure machine?

Until we become happier beings than our ancestors were, we should refrain from any attempt to impose our mental structure on artificial carrier systems.

We are imprisoned in a terrible monkey body.

Postbiotic subjectivity is much better than biological subjectivity.

a species whose members once longed to have immortal souls but are slowly recognizing they are self-less Ego Machines.

Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential conflict,

makes us inherently religious:

One of the most important philosophical tasks ahead will be to develop a new and comprehensive anthropology—one that synthesizes the knowledge we have gained about ourselves.

What to do with our new understanding of ourselves

Clash between old and new images of humanity.

Two questions:  What is a human being.  What should a human being become?

people who believe in the existence of a soul or in life after death may no longer meet with twentieth-century Western tolerance but with condescension—much as do people who continue to claim that the sun revolves around the Earth.

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.

if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others.

More than 80 percent of the human beings on this planet, especially those in poorer countries with growing populations, are still firmly rooted in prescientific cultures. Many of them will not even want to hear about the neural correlates of consciousness or the phenomenal self-model.

Most of us are completely unaware of the potential and depth of our experiential space.

We will learn to make use of these discoveries to overcome the limitations of our biologically evolved Ego Tunnels. The fact that we can actively design the structure of our conscious minds has been neglected

If reliable mood-optimizers become available, will grumpiness or premenstrual syndrome in the workplace be seen as unkemptness or dishevelment, in much the same way as strong body odor is today?

Today we have a legal market and an illegal market; thus, there are legal states of consciousness and illegal states of consciousness. With drugs the technologies are coming, they are gradually getting better, and looking the other way will not help.

What is a good state of consciousness?

The Ego Tunnel evolved as a biological system of representation and information-processing that is part of a social network of communicating Ego Tunnels.

Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life.

the naturalistic turn in the image of human beings,

Disagree with view that On normative issues, there is no such thing as expert knowledge.

Many fear that through the naturalistic turn in the image of mind, we will lose our dignity.

Reconcile intellectual honesty and spirituality