The Ego Tunnel: The Science Of the Mind and the Myth Of the Self [Paperback]

I heartily agree with the positive opinions of others here - this is a first class addition to the lay person's literature on consciousness by a world class philosopher. Absolutely fascinating and revolutionary. I've written a detailed review at http://www.naturalism.org/metzinger.htm , some sections of which I've excerpted here:

Even after giving up belief in the supernatural "up there," many atheists and humanists continue to harbor quasi-supernatural intuitions about the self and free will "in here." The little god of the soul, the categorically mental agent or homunculus in charge of the brain, is still alive and well in the thinking of many secularists. As a result, some of the most profound developments in the ongoing project of scientific enlightenment are still ahead of us.

I am pleased to report that Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel is a major contribution to this project, written for the curious and fearless lay person wanting to know who, precisely, we are. I strongly recommend this book. Here is the self fully naturalized, a radical revision of the conventional wisdom about our essential nature - are you ready? It's also a must read for anyone interested in consciousness and the mind-body problem, since Metzinger has a well-developed, empirically supported representational theory that explains many of the puzzles about conscious subjectivity.

His two main themes, self and consciousness, are closely linked, and they culminate in two rather unsettling conclusions. First, selves don't exist in the way most folks suppose. Second, the solid, three dimensional public reality that is so palpably there in our waking lives turns out to be a private model of reality. On Metzinger's view, the self - the feeling of being a mental me in charge of the physical body - is a module within consciousness activated by your brain's neural processing. The self is categorically *not* some substantial, essential invariant entity, like a soul, spirit or homunculus. As he emphasizes, there are no such things as substantial selves. Instead, the self is a phenomenal (that is, experiential) construct that disintegrates entirely when you fall into a dreamless sleep, to be reactivated (usually in attenuated form) when you dream, and that reappears nearly instantaneously when you awake in the morning. The self is put online only when needed, part of a larger phenomenal reality generated by the brain as it represents the world and you in it. This reality seems perfectly concrete, but the startling fact of the matter, a challenge to naïve realists (that is, just about everybody), is that it's an appearance, a *virtual* reality. You, the subject conjured up by the brain, do not directly encounter the world. Rather, you participate in a larger brain-based representational construction - consciousness - that maps the actual world closely enough for you-the-organism to stay out of trouble. This global simulation carried out in each of our heads, what we can't help but take as real, is what Metzinger calls the Ego Tunnel. Welcome to the Matrix...

...The full exposition of his theory, daunting in its intricacy but ultimately very rewarding, can be found in his 2003 tour de force Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. So if you find The Ego Tunnel philosophically or empirically sketchy, look there. As I advised a philosophy grad student recently: "Try Being No One, you might like it."

The Ego Tunnel is reasonably demanding in its own right, given the breadth of material and its undeniable strangeness for those encountering the self-model theory for the first time. Even for veterans of consciousness studies it offers much that's worthwhile and likely new: some mind-stretching thought experiments; interviews with researchers on the binding problem (the unity of consciousness), dreams, and empathy; and an imagined conversation with a post-biotic philosopher who pities us merely human thinkers, stuck in our crude reality models (this is just one of several well-timed dessert moments in the book). Metzinger is a first rate, albeit human, neurophilosopher, fully cognizant of mind science as well as philosophy, and a very good writer in his second language (German the first). You might occasionally get boggled and baffled as you negotiate The Ego Tunnel, but never bored. The main thing is that you're getting a glimpse behind (what you might not yet realize is) the veil of consciousness, in a sense escaping the tunnel into non-subjective reality, if only conceptually. You're also getting a preview of what our lives might be like under a radically revised notion of self, should the "consciousness revolution" Metzinger contemplates come to pass. There might be, he suggests, some profound personal and social consequences that follow from fully naturalizing ourselves...

...Metzinger argues that it's only by assimilating the naturalistic truth about who we are that we can defend individual autonomy against mass culture and its potential for manipulation. Facing the scientific facts about the self also expresses a central human value: maintaining our cognitive dignity and responsibility as knowers, what he calls "the will to clarity." The philosophical, scientific, and moral issues raised in this book couldn't be more demanding, but Metzinger exemplifies how we can best meet the challenge: by an unflinching commitment to rational and empirical investigation, wherever it leads, carried out within a democratic, open society of individuals informed about their true nature. Whether or not it's completely right about the mind, The Ego Tunnel models the intellectual and ethical virtues that will be required of us, as Metzinger puts it, to "ride the tiger" of the consciousness revolution.

Tom Clark
Center for Naturalism

I'm an avid reader of books about the brain, consciousness, and what the "self" is (or isn't). Metzinger's is one of the best. Thankfully, he isn't content with simply describing the current state of neuroscience, which can be dry to a non-scientist like me, with all its talk of physical brain functions and such.

Metzinger also addresses important philosophical and ethical problems such as free will, the concept of soul, how we can be certain an experience is real, consciousness exploration through drugs and other outside means, and whether happiness or truth-seeking is the best foundation of a meaningful life.

"The Ego Tunnel" is a great example of how one shouldn't judge a book by a single critical review. I read Owen Flanagan's review in New Scientist and questioned whether I should buy this book. I'm glad that I made up my own mind, because that review was way off the mark, in my non-humble opinion.

I didn't find a trace of the philosophical grandiosity that Flanagan talked about. Instead, I found big problems being addressed, as noted above. Hey, I'm going to die! We all are, one day. Whether I have a self, or soul, that is separable from my physical body is of more than a little importance to me.

This may be a settled question among academic neuroscientists, but it certainly isn't among the people I know. Which, naturally, includes myself. I lean toward a Taoist/Buddhist conception of the cosmos these days, and found much to support that way of viewing reality in Metzinger's book: science and philosophy blending in a pleasingly coherent fashion.

But he stresses the need for each of us to dig our own ego tunnel (not that we have any choice). I liked this passage: "A true consciousness culture will always be subversive, by encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own lives. The current lack of a genuine consciousness culture is a social expression of the fact that the philosophical project of enlightenment has become stuck: What we lack is not faith but knowledge."

Those who want a formal description of Thomas Metzinger's theory of the self should go to his earlier works or his recent TICS article to find it. For those who find that kind of writing inaccessible, The Ego Tunnel is a good bet for an accurate, and often elegant, description of the work being done (and the work that should be done) in the sciences and philosophy on consciousness and the self.

The Ego Tunnel was written for those outside of consciousness research to answer Metzinger's felt imperative: "Scientists and academic philosophers cannot simply confine themselves to making contributions to a comprehensive theory of consciousness and the self. If moral obligation exists, they must also confront the anthropological and normative void they have created. They must communicate their results in laymen's language" (215). The Ego Tunnel is thus a double success: it communicates Metzinger's work on the self together with a normative groundwork for consciousness research in "laymen's language" while at the same time offering insight into the mind of one of philosophy's best consciousness researchers.

The book is split into three sections: the first offers the main problems with accounting for conscious experience, ending with the problem of subjectivity; the second gives evidence to think that there is no self to answer the problem of subjectivity and offers an alternative solution; the third is a first look at the ethical obligations that arise from this finding. The content of the book includes clear, concise descriptions of empirical work, philosophical derivations from this work, anecdotes about the author's first-hand experiences with lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences, and interviews with three researchers and one imaginary philosopher (the first post-biotic philosopher).

Readers will enjoy prose like the following:

"Sleep is the little brother of death; it means letting go of the world." (30)

"But the deepest form of inwardness was the creation of an internal self/world border. In evolution, this process started physically, with the development of cell membranes and an immune system to define which cells in one's body were to be treated as one's own and which were intruders." (64)

"So it is clearly the more subtle experience of controlling the focus of attention, which sees to be at the heart of inwardness--selfhood-as-subjectivity is intimately related to "modelling mental resource allocation" as some sober computational neuroscientist might say." (103)

"Maybe you have had a lucid dream yourself; the phenomenon is not rare. If not, you can try a number of different induction techniques...As an intrepid philosophical psychonaut, I have of course tried to build devices to do this kind of exploring..." (141-2)

(Title of a section:) "How to Build An Artificial Conscious Subject and Why We Shouldn't Do It" (191)

"Given all our new knowledge about the neural basis of consciousness experience, the burden of proof now shifts to the side of the meat-eaters--and perhaps even to the intellectual carnivores like me, philosopher parasites and other people indirectly profiting from an ethically dubious research practice." (231)

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