Thomas Metzinger

Agora

Thomas Metzinger

b. 1958

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Nobody has ever been or had a self: what we experience as our self is a model the brain builds and cannot recognise as a model.

Placement

Analytic Philosophy · Western Europe · Mind & Consciousness, Existence & Self, Ethics

Mainz philosopher of mind: “nobody ever was or had a self” – what we experience as a self is a transparent model built by the brain; he calls for an ethics of consciousness and a moratorium on artificial suffering.

Key ideas

Phenomenal self-model
The Ego Tunnel
Moratorium on synthetic phenomenology

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Criticism

Criticizes 1

René Descartes

criticised
Metzinger argued that the Cartesian intuition of an irreducible self stems from the mind’s representational structure: there are no selves, only transparent self-models (Being No One, 2003). T. Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003); The Ego Tunnel (2009)
Evidence: AI draft
René Descartes › 1596–1650

Position

Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity, set out in “Being No One”, begins with the claim that “no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self.” What exists is a “phenomenal self-model”, a representation of the organism as a whole that the brain constructs. This model is “transparent”: we cannot experience it as a model but look through it, and so we identify with its content and experience ourselves as a self in direct contact with the world. “The Ego Tunnel” presents the theory for a general audience: conscious experience is like a tunnel, an inner simulation that we take for reality itself. Metzinger draws ethical conclusions. He calls for an ethics and a “culture” of consciousness that combines intellectual honesty with contemplative practice, and he has argued for a global moratorium, until 2050, on research that risks creating artificial systems capable of suffering, since such research could cause a sudden vast growth of negative phenomenal states. His recent work studies reports of “pure consciousness” in meditation.

Life & context

Thomas Metzinger (born 1958 in Frankfurt am Main) studied philosophy, ethnology and religious studies in Frankfurt, took his doctorate there in 1985 and qualified as a professor in Gießen in 1992. After a short period in Osnabrück he became professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2000, where he taught until his retirement in 2022. He was a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and later its president, and was elected to the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, in 2022. From 2018 to 2020 he served on the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, whose ethics guidelines he publicly criticised as “ethics washing”.