Thomas Metzinger Quotes

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• As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Past, Information Processing, Brain

  Thomas Metzinger (2009). “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”, p.36, Basic Books

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• The self is not a thing, but a process.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Self, Process

  Thomas Metzinger (2010). “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”, p.208, Basic Books

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• The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mean, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Space, Evidence, Phenomenal

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Self Esteem, Mind, Behaviour

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans, avoid risks, and treat our fellow human beings fairly - for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern ourselves.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Believe, Long, Risk

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Virtual reality is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible - ideally, by creating a subjective sense of "presence" and full immersion in the user.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Real, Self, Creating

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Ego, Looks, Persons

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• Subjective time flows forward, the phenomenal self is embedded into this flow, an inner history unfolds. That it is why it is not a bubble, but a tunnel: There is movement in time.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Tunnels, Self, Movement

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Running, Philosophical, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Perspective, Firsts, Consciousness

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Flow, Communicate, Humans

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Retribution is really a stone age concept.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Age, Stones, Retribution

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• I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Religious, Believe, Phenomenology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Conscious, Arise, Subjects

  Thomas Metzinger (2009). “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”, p.96, Basic Books

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• When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mind, Body, Spontaneous

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• As far as inner action is concerned, we are only rarely truly self-determined persons, for the major part of our conscious mental activity rather is an automatic, unintentional form of behavior on the subpersonal level.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Self, Levels, Action

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust "out-of-the brain experience", a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Tunnels, Interesting, Ego

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Reality, Smell, Political

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• What many people don't see is that there are abundant examples of phenomenal opacity: It is one of the most interesting features of the human conscious model of reality that, first, it can contain elements that are not experienced as mind-independent, as unequivocally real, as immediately given, and second, that there is a "gradient of realness" in which one and the same content can be experienced transparently or in an opaque fashion.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Fashion, Real, Independent

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For a human being, to possess a consciously experienced first-person perspective means to have acquired a very specific functional profile and distinctive level of representational content in one's currently active phenomenal self-model: It has, episodically, become a dynamic inner model of a knowing self.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mean, Self, Knowing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Thinking, Silence, Able

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Discipline, Helping, Philosopher

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Writing, Chocolate, Vision

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In ordinary life, the phenomenology of embodied emotions is an excellent example for dynamic changes between transparency and opacity: You can "directly perceive" that your wife is cheating you, or you can become aware of the possibility that maybe it is you who has a problem, that your "immediate" emotional representation of social reality might actually be a misrepresentation.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Cheating, Reality, Emotional

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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