The Ego Tunnel Quotes

“Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our "reality tunnel.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

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

“Scientists who believe that their discipline will progressively eliminate all philosophical problems are simply fooling themselves. What science can contribute to is the elimination of false philosophical problems.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning and embed it in a positive metacontext—it is the deeply human attempt to finally feel at home. It is a strategy to outsmart the hedonic treadmill. On an individual level, it seems to be one of the most successful ways to achieve a stable state—as good as or better than any drug so far discovered. Now science seems to be taking all this away from us. The emerging emptiness may be one reason for the current rise of religious fundamentalism, even in secular societies. Yes,”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“The biological imperative to live—indeed, live forever—was burned into our brains, into our emotional self-model,
over the course of millennia. But our brand-new cognitive self-models
tell us that all attempts to realize this imperative will ultimately be futile.
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, and we seem to be the first creatures on this planet to
experience it consciously.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“The most beautiful idea, perhaps, is that freedom and determinism can peacefully coexist: If our brains are causally determined in the right way, if they make us causally sensitive to moral considerations and rational arguments, then this very fact makes us free. Determinism and free will are compatible.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“But it is also becoming evident that psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Surprisingly, there is a representation of the human hand in Broca’s area, a section of the human brain involved in language processing, speech or sign production, and comprehension. A number of studies have shown that hand/arm gestures and movements of the mouth are linked through a common neural substrate. For example, grasping movements influence pronunciation—and not only when they are executed but also when they are observed. It has also been demonstrated that hand gestures and mouth gestures are directly linked in humans, and the oro-laryngeal movement patterns we create in order to produce speech are a part of this link. Broca’s area is also a marker for the development of language in human evolution, so it is intriguing to see that it also contains a motor representation of hand movements; here may be a part of the bridge that led from the “body semantics” of gestures and the bodily self-model to linguistic semantics, associated with sounds, speech production, and abstract meaning expressed in our cognitive self-model, the thinking self.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events. As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Sleep is the little brother of death; it means letting go of the world.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“If we arrive at a comprehensive theory of consciousness, and if we develop ever more sophisticated tools to alter the contents of subjective experience, we will have to think hard about what a good state of consciousness is. We urgently need fresh and convincing answers to questions like the following: Which states of consciousness do we want our children to have? Which states of consciousness do we want to foster, and which do we want to ban on ethical grounds? Which states of consciousness can we inflict upon animals, or upon machines?”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“there are innumerable things in life you can fathom only by experiencing them, that there is a depth in pure perception that cannot be grasped or invaded by thought or language.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“More and more people will start telling themselves: "I don't understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I've seen through the game. The most efficient strategy will be to go on pretending I'm a conservative, old-fashioned believer in moral values.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“...all sentient beings capable of suffering should constitute a solidarity against suffering. Out of this solidarity, we should refrain from doing anything that could increase the overall amount of suffering and confusion in the universe.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“The human brain can be compared to a modern flight simulator in several respects. Like a flight simulator, it constructs and continuously updates an internal model of external reality by using a continuous stream of input supplied by the sensory organs and employing past experience as a filter. It integrates sensory-input channels into a global model of reality, and it does so in real time. However, there is a difference. 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. For us, phenomenal reality is not a simulational space constructed by our brains; in a direct and experientially untranscendable manner, it is the world we live in. Its virtuality is hidden, whereas a flight simulator is easily recognized as a flight simulator—its images always seem artificial. This is so because our brains continuously supply us with a much better reference model of the world than does the computer controlling the flight simulator. The images generated by our visual cortex are updated much faster and more accurately than the images appearing in a head-mounted display. The same is true for our proprioceptive and kinesthetic perceptions; the movements generated by a seat shaker can never be as accurate and as rich in detail as our own sensory perceptions.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“By consciously experiencing some elements of our tunnel as mere images or thoughts about the world, we became aware of the possibility of misrepresentation. We understood that sometimes we can be wrong, since reality is only a specific type of appearance. As evolved representational systems, we could now represent one of the most important facts about ourselves—namely, that we are representational systems. We were able to grasp the notions of truth and falsity, of knowledge and illusion. As soon as we had grasped this distinction, cultural evolution exploded, because we became ever more intelligent by systematically increasing knowledge and minimizing illusion. The discovery of the appearance/reality distinction was possible because we realized that some of the content of our conscious minds is constructed internally and because we could introspectively apprehend the construction process. The technical term here would be phenomenal opacity—the opposite of transparency. Those things in the evolution of consciousness that are old, ultrafast, and extremely reliable—such as the qualities of sensory experience—are transparent; abstract conscious thought is not. From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains. In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know that our thoughts are not given but made.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Then there are “virtual organs”—feelings (courage, anger, desire) and the phenomenal experience of seeing colored objects or hearing music or having a certain episodic memory. The immune response, which is realized only when needed, is another example of a virtual organ: For a certain time, it creates special causal properties, has a certain function, and does a job for the organism. When the job is done, it disappears. Virtual organs are like physical organs in that they fulfill a specific function; they are coherent assemblies of functional properties that allow you to do new things. Though part of a behavioral repertoire on the macro level of observable traits, they can also be seen as composed of billions of concerted micro-events—immune cells or neurons firing away. Unlike a liver or a heart, they are realized transiently.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Theories of consciousness have cultural consequences.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“If we do have something like dignity we can demonstrate this fact by the way we confront the challenges to come... We could face the the historical transition in our image of ourselves creatively and with a will to clarity. It is also clear how we could lose our dignity: by clinging to the past, by developing a culture of denial, and by sliding back into the various forms of irrationalism and fundamentalism.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Let me try: Consciousness is inwardness in time. It makes the world present for you by creating a new space in your mind—the space of temporal internality.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“It must be emphasized that although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there is no little man running things inside our head. The Ego and the Tunnel are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical self-organization on many levels. Ultimately, 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. But no such things as selves exist in the world. A biological organism, as such, is not a self. An Ego is not a self, either, but merely a form of representational content—namely, the content of a transparent self-model activated in the organism’s brain.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” —ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE,”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“The problem of consciousness is all about subjective experience, about the structure of our inner life, and not about knowledge of the outer world.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“Представьте, что вы смогли бы интроспективно проникнуть в гораздо более глубокие и ранние фазы вашей информационной обработки, в то время, пока вы смотрите на книгу в ваших руках. Что бы тогда произошло? Репрезентация тогда более не была бы прозрачной, но она всё равно оставалась бы в пределах туннеля. Поток взаимодействующих паттернов неожиданно обрушился бы на вас; альтернативные интерпретации и интенсивно соперничающие ассоциации вторглись бы в вашу жизнь. Вы потеряли бы себя в мириадах микрособытий собственного мозга, происходящих каждую секунду, просто затерялись бы в себе. Ваш ум разошёлся бы по бесчисленным циклам самоисследования.
Возможно, это то, что Олдос Хаксли имел ввиду, когда, в своём классическом произведении 1954 года (Двери Восприятия) он цитировал Уильяма Блэйка: «если вышибить дверь восприятия, тогда всё окажется таким, каким оно есть, бесконечным. Но человек запер себя сам, поэтому видит все вещи сквозь маленькую щель своей пещеры».”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“appearance of a world is consciousness. But the decisive step to an Ego Machine is the next one. If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego and a naive realist about whatever its self-model says it is.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious, and the phenomenal self-model was born into the Ego Tunnel, allowing us to achieve global control of our bodies in a much more selective and flexible manner. This was the step from being an embodied natural system that has and uses an internal image of itself as a whole to a system that, in addition, consciously experiences this fact.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“I believe the human self-model was successful because it installed your social group as an ideal observer in your mind, and to a much stronger degree than was the case in any other primate brain. This created a dense causal linkage between global group-control and global self-control—a new kind of ownership, as it were. Investigators of these”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self