This is a radical rethinking of the nature of consciousness. "The Ego Tunnel", a major work from one of the brightest of the new generation of philosophers of mind, proposes a simple yet radical rethinking of the nature of consciousness and a fascinating and controversial exploration of what it implies. We're used to thinking of the self's relation to the world as a dyad-the inner me as opposed to the outer world. This model assumes that what we're perceiving when we experience the world is actually the world. It's almost impossible to escape a sort of naive realism when you employ this model, since the alternative is that the world outside yourself is a dream. Thomas Metzinger's model, however, based on the increasingly sophisticated and bizarre findings of neuroscience, is different. There is an outside world and an inner, unconscious mind, but we directly perceive neither. Instead, both our outward perceptions and our inward consciousness are a kind of interface, a membrane, between the mind and the world. Everything that we experience is 'a virtual self in a virtual reality'. This idea leads to a number of implications, scientific, ethical and pharmacological. If the interface is not 'real' then why and how did it evolve? How does the mind construct it? What does it mean to manipulate it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy and moral accountability, and if not, how can we retain institutions that assume all of these things? "The Ego Tunnel" is an indispensable guide to a new era when the science of the mind may displace evolution as the most controversial of the sciences.
Thomas Metzinger (*1958 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) is currently Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study.
In 2008 he received prestigious one-year Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study), is past president of the German Cognitive Science Society and was president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness from 2009 to 2010.
His focus of research lies in analytical philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophical aspects of the neuro- and cognitive sciences as well as connections between ethics, philosophy of mind and anthropology.
In the English language, he has edited two collections on consciousness ("Conscious Experience", Paderborn: mentis & Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 1995; "Neural Correlates of Consciousness", Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000) and one major scientific monograph developing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary theory about consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective ("Being No One - The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity", Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
In 2009, he published a popular book, which addresses a wider audience and also discusses the ethical, cultural and social consequences of consciousness research ("The Ego Tunnel - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self", New York: Basic Books).
Details at http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/ET.html
There are a number of videos on YouTube, German as well as English.
