Thomas Metzinger

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz | JGU · Department of Philosophy

Objective To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators. Methods An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) col- lected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual ana- logue scale were submitted to exploratory and conf...

This paper has a critical and a constructive part. The first part formulates a political demand, based on ethical considerations: Until 2050, there should be a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology, strictly banning all research that directly aims at or knowingly risks the emergence of artificial consciousness on post-biotic carrier systems....

This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiat...

This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.

Recent studies have highlighted the role of multisensory integration as a key mechanism of self-consciousness. In particular, integration of bodily signals within the peripersonal space (PPS) underlies the experience of the self in a body we own (self-identification) and that is experienced as occupying a specific location in space (self-location),...

Zeitgleich zum Digital-Manifest legten mehrere Philosophen ein Diskussionspapier über die Risiken und Chancen von künstlicher Intelligenz vor. Darin warnen sie vor historisch beispiellosen ethischen Herausforderungen durch die weitere KI-Entwicklung. Ein Gespräch mit Thomas Metzinger, einem der Autoren.

Versuche zeigen: Unser Ichbewusstsein ist nicht zwangsläufig an unseren Körper gebunden – es lässt sich in äußere Avatare übertragen, so dass wir uns in diesen verorten.

A unique interdisciplinary collection of papers and commentaries by leading researchers and rising scholars, representing the latest research on consciousness, mind, and brain. This collection offers the most comprehensive collection on consciousness, brain, and mind available. It gathers 39 original papers by leaders in the field followed by comme...

Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as “enactive.” This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts...

Recent studies have highlighted the role of multisensory integration as a key mechanism of self-consciousness. In particular, integration of bodily signals within the peripersonal space (PPS) underlies the experience of the self in a body we own (self-identification) and that is experienced as occupying a specific location in space (self-location),...

Our starting assumption is that consciousness (subjective experience), rather than being an epiphenomenon, has a causal role in the optimisation of certain human behaviours. After briefly outlining some of the critical properties of consciousness, we review the many empirical studies demonstrating how much can be achieved in the way of action and d...

This chapter considers action-oriented processing from a model-oriented standpoint. Possible relationships between action and cognition are reviewed in abstract or conceptual terms. We then turn to models of their interrelationships and role in mediating cognitively enriched behaviors. Examples of theories or models inspired by the action-oriented...

The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the re...

Julia Pliushch and Thomas Metzinger attempt to shed light on the phenomenon of self-deception using some of the conceptual tools offered by Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity. They analyze a selected set of recent and well-documented empirical examples for human self-deception. They then offer a functionalist and representationalist anal...

The main criticism Pfeiffer advances in his commentary is that our proposal is too narrow. Embodied simulation (ES), in his view equated to motor resonance, is not a sufficiently primary mechanism on which we can base a unified neurobiological theory of the earliest sense of self and others. According to Pfeiffer, motor resonance needs to be comple...

Regina Fabry has proposed an intriguing marriage of enculturated cognition and predictive processing. I raise some questions for whether this marriage will work and warn against expecting too much from the predictive processing framework. Furthermore I argue that the predictive processes at a sub-personal level cannot be driving the innovations at...

Most thinking about cognition proceeds on the assumption that we are born with our primary cognitive faculties intact and they simply need to mature, or be fine-tuned by learning mechanisms. Alternatively, a growing number of thinkers are aligning themselves to the view that a process of enculturation transforms our basic biological faculties. What...

What we traditionally call 'conscious thought' actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content....

Etwas hat sich geändert: In Bezug auf den Klimawandel ist nicht mehr intellektuell redlich, Optimist zu sein. Wenn man den heute verfügbaren physikalischen, psychologischen und politischen Tatsachen vorurteilsfrei ins Auge sieht, dann sieht alles danach aus, dass die Menschheit an diesem Problem scheitern wird, und zwar sehenden Auges. Denn die ver...

In this reply, I circumvent (some might say dodge) a number of Gottschling's fine-grained comments by stepping back and reviewing the key points of the three major sections of my target paper in light of her more general concerns. I first consider Gottschling's primary criticism of the first section of my paper, namely that insights that might emer...

Three examples: Altered states as contrast classes, self-model phase transitions in lucidity, and the devastating epistemological consequences of cognitive corruption.

Seth develops a convincing and detailed internalist alternative to the sensorimotor-contingency theory of perceptual phenomenology. However, there are remaining conceptual problems due to a semantic ambiguity in the notion of "presence" and the idea of "subjective veridicality." The current model should be integrated with the earlier idea that expe...

Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of study and research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics and...

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call "conscious thought" is be...

This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property o...

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Entgegen der historischen Darstellung, nach der es sich bei Aufmerksamkeit um einen einzelnen Prozess handelt (James 1890), scheint ›Aufmerksamkeit‹ in den letzten Dekaden immer mehr zu einem Sammelbegriff für eine Vielzahl verschiedener Prozesse geworden zu sein, die die Informationsverarbeitung sowohl in natürlichen intelligenten Systemen (z. B....

An evaluating survey of the development of the neuroethics of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement (PCE) during the last decade, focussing on the situation in Germany, has been undertaken. This article presents the most important conceptual problems, current substances and central ethical and legal issues. Very first guidelines and recommendations...

Cognitive enhancement aims at optimizing a specific class of information-processing functions: cognitive functions, physically realized by the human brain. This article deals with ethical issues in cognitive enhancement (CE). It discusses some standard conceptual issues related to the notion of "cognitive enhancement" and then continues from a pure...

Moderated by Krista Tippett, creator and host of America Public Media's On Being, philosophers Thomas Metzinger (University of Mainz, Germany) and Evan Thompson (University of Toronto) join cardiologist and expert on near-death experiences Pim van Lommel (Hospital Rijnstate, the Netherlands) to examine recent developments in neuroscience and philos...

WHENEVER popular or academic debates about 'the self' flare up again, we can often observe an embarrassing fact: Just because-quite obviously, and in many cultures-there is a folk-metaphysical and a folk-phenomenological concept of'the self', and just because someone has put this concept back on the agenda, many participants automatically assume th...

In synesthesia, a certain stimulus (e.g. grapheme) is associated automatically and consistently with a stable perceptual-like experience (e.g. color). These associations are acquired in early childhood and remain robust throughout the lifetime. Synesthetic associations can transfer to novel inducers in adulthood as one learns a second language that...

In synesthesia, a certain stimulus (e.g. grapheme) is associated automatically and consistently with a stable perceptual-like experience (e.g. color). These associations are acquired in early childhood and remain robust throughout the lifetime. Synesthetic associations can transfer to novel inducers in adulthood as one learns a second language that...

We highlight the latest research on body perception and self-consciousness, but argue that despite these achievements, central aspects have remained unexplored, namely, global aspects of bodily self-consciousness. Researchers investigated central representations of body parts and actions involving these, but neglected the global and unitary charact...

A concise sketch of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT; Metzinger, 2003a), aimed at empirical researchers. Discussion of some candidate mechanisms by which self-awareness could appear in a physically realized information-processing system like the brain, using empirical examples from various scientific disciplines. The paper introduces two...

In the 24 August issue, two teams of cognitive neuroscientists used video-based immersive virtual reality systems to induce an “out-of-body” experience in healthy volunteers (Brevia, H. H. Ehrsson, p. [1048][1]; Reports, B. Lenggenhager et al. , p. [1096][2]). An important implication of this

Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading to a striking disturbance of bodily self-consciousness. On the basis of these clinical data, we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-soma...

Today, based on a more differentiated understanding of both the phenomenological and neurophysiological features of dreaming, it is possible to give a relatively straightforward and affirmative answer to the question of whether dreams are conscious experiences occurring in sleep. At the same time, these new insights into the nature of dreaming requ...

Inventors claim that new technologies can ferret out fibbers, but it is unclear what the gear actually reveals

I have learned a lot from Josh Weisberg's substantial criticism in his well-crafted and systematic commentary (see also his book review in Weisberg 2003). Unfortunately, I have to concede many of the points he intelligently makes. But I am also flattered by the way he ultimately uses his criticism to emphasize some of those aspects of the theory th...

Let me begin by thanking both the Doroth茅e Legrand, the editor of this special issue, and Timothy Bayne, general editor of PSYCHE for their great and sustained efforts to make this debate possible. Everyone who has ever done this type of service to the philosophical community knows how much work it really is-I am therefore more than grateful to bot...

theory of subjectivity and have developed such a scholarly expertise on the project as a whole (including all its difficulty) as Doroth茅e Legrand has done. In the last sentence of her commentary, Legrand alludes to the ugly consequences I have to face after calling the book Being No One: I am suddenly confronted with people from all over the world...

Let me begin by pointing out a number of potential misunderstandings in Pierre Livet's densely written commentary. In the first paragraph, Pierre Livet writes, "phenomenal transparency involves an implication of the existence of the entities represented" (p.2). This is what I call the "extensionality equivocation" (BNO: p. 167). As explained at len...

Contemporary philosophical and scienti .c discussions of mind developed from a 'proto-concept of mind ',a mythical,tradition- alistic,animistic and quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. It can be found in many di .erent cultures and has a semantic core corresponding to the folk-phenomenological notion of a 'soul '.It will be argu...

Das Ziel dieses Beitrags besteht darin, eine sehr kurze Darstellung der "Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität" anzubieten, die auch für solche Leute verständlich ist, die keine Berufsphilosophen sind. Die Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität ist eine philosophische Theorie darüber, was ein Selbst ist, eine Theorie darüber, was es eigentlich bed...

This is a short sketch of some central ideas developed in my recent book Being No One (BNO hereafter). A more systematic summary, which focuses on short answers to a set of specific, individual questions is already contained in the book, namely as BNO section 8.2. Here, I deliberately and completely exclude all work related to semantically differen...

To speak of “inferences,” “interpretations,” and so forth is just folk psychology. It creates new homunculi, and it is also implausible from a purely phenomenological perspective. Phenomenal volition must be described in the conceptual framework of an empirically plausible theory of mental representation. It is a non sequitur to conclude from disso...

The value of Noë and Thompson's contribution consists in highlighting a series of important methodological and conceptual issues associated with current research in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. Frequently, these are not seen by empirical scientists attempting to delineate the neural correlate for a given type of phenomenal experienc...

This is a brief and accessible English summary of the "Self-model Theory of Subjectivity" (SMT), which is only available as German book in this archive. It introduces two new theoretical entities, the "phenomenal self-model" (PSM) and the "phenomenal model of the intentionality-relation" PMIR. A representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-...

To have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too. It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions. It decomposes target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant....

A representationalist analysis of strong first-person phenomena is developed (Baker 1998), and it is argued that conscious, cognitive self-reference can be naturalized under this representationalist analysis. According to this view, the phenomenal first-person perspective is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a cognitive first-person p...

The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In thi...

This is a short sketch of some central ideas developed in my recent book Being No One (BNO hereafter). A more systematic summary, which focuses on short answers to a set of specific, individual questions is already contained in the book, namely as BNO section 8.2. Here, I deliberately and completely exclude all work related to semantically differen...

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas...

Was wären die Bedingungen dafür, dass wir von einem künstlichen bzw. nichtbiologischen System annehmen, dass es bewusste Erlebnisse besitzt? Wodurch wird aus einem informationsverarbeitenden System ein Subjekt von Erfahrung? Und: Wann wären wir in der Annahme gerechtfertigt, dass es auch ein bewusstes Selbst und eine echte, bewusst erlebte Innenper...

Das neue Jahrhundert ­ so ist immer wieder zu hören ­ wird das Jahrhundert der Biowissenschaften. Durch die Fortschritte, die in den Neuro-, Informations- und Kognitionswissenschaften zum Teil in rasantem Tempo gemacht werden, wird sich nicht nur das allgemeine Bild vom Menschen, sondern auch unser Begriff davon, was eigentlich Bewußtsein und Gei...

In dieser Arbeit geht es nicht um eine weitere modische Liquidation des Subjekts, sondern um dessen Rehabilitation als Gegenstand ernsthafter theoretischer Bemühungen. Das Thema, um das die folgenden Untersuchungen kreisen, ist die Perspektivität unseres phänomenalen Bewußtseins. Perspektivität" ist zunächst jedoch nicht mehr als eine metaphorische...

Die Neuro- und Kognitionswissenschaften liefern uns gegenwärtig eine Flut neuer Erkenntnisse über den Zusammenhang zwischen bewußter und unbewußter Handlungssteuerung (Jeannerod 1997, Gerhard Roth und Werner X. Schneider in diesem Band). Für die Philosophie ergeben sich aus diesen Erkenntnissen mindestens drei große Klassen von Fragestellungen. Ers...

In den letzten zehn Jahren haben wir mehr über die Struktur und die Wirkungsweise des menschlichen Gehirns erfahren als in den dreihundert Jahren davor. Es ist bereits jetzt abzusehen, daß der Wissenszuwachs in den Neurowissenschaften sich auch in der Zukunft weiter mit großer Geschwindigkeit fortsetzen wird. Wenn diese Annahme richtig ist, dann wi...

This book contains a representationalist theory of self-consciousness and of the phenomenal first-person perspective. It draws on empirical data from the cognitive and neurosciences.

The article presents a critical survey of the philosophical discussion of the mind-body-problem since the collapse of Rylean behaviourism. The major theories (identity theories, supervenience, emergentist materialism, dualist interactionism and functionalism) are sketched and briefly evaluated with regard to their advantages and disadvantages. The...

In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich dafür, daß Qualia im Sinne einer analytisch strikten Definition nämlich als einfachste Form phänomenalen Gehalts im Sinne phänomenaler Eigenschaften erster Ordnung - nicht existieren. Relativ einfache empirische Überlegungen zeigen nämlich bereits, daß wir keine introspektiven Identitätskriterien für viele Formen...

Die Begriffe "bewußt" und "Bewußtsein" bezeichnen in der Alltagspsychologie eine Reihe verschiedener Phänomene. Hauptsächlich lassen sich die folgenden fünf Verwendungsweisen unterscheiden. Erstens wird der Begriff des Bewußtseins als einstelliges Prädikat Personen zugeschrieben, um damit zu kennzeichnen, daß diese sich im Zustand des Wachseins bef...

Das Ziel dieses Beitrags besteht darin, eine sehr kurze Darstellung der Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität" anzubieten, die auch für solche Leute verständlich ist, die keine Berufsphilosophen sind. Die Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität ist eine philosophische Theorie darüber, was ein Selbst ist, eine Theorie darüber, was es eigentlich bede...

Wissen Sie, was der Unterschied zwischen einem Schimpansen und einem Rhesusaffen ist? Wenn wir an einer modernen Theorie der Subjektivität interessiert sind, dann wird der interessanteste Unterschied vielleicht der folgende sein: Ein Schimpanse kann lernen, sich selbst im Spiegel wiederzuerkennen - ein Rhesusaffe kann es nicht. Auch Orang-Utans ver...

Was genau ist eigentlich eine Ich-Störung? Ich werde auf den folgenden Seiten dafür argumentieren, daß man die Natur dieses Typs von psychiatrischen Störungsbildern besser verstehen kann, indem man einen Blick über die medizinischen Fachgrenzen hinweg in die analytische Philosophie des Geistes und in die Kognitionswissenschaft wirft. Beiden Diszipl...

In this contribution I will argue that our traditional, folk-phenomenological concept of a "soul� may have its origins in accurate and truthful first-person reports about the experiential content of a specific neurophenomenological state-class. This class of phenomenal states is called the "Out-of-body experience� (OBE hereafter), and I will of...

"Identity disorders" constitute a large class of psychiatric disturbances that, due to deviant forms ofself-modeling, result in dramatic changes in the patients' phenomenal experience of their own personal identity. The phenomenal experience of selfhood and transtemporal identity can vary along an extremely large number of dimensions: There are sim...