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Body, Self and Consciousness by Thomas Metzinger

Prof. Thomas Metzinger speaks on Body, Self and Consciousness as part of the Azim Premji University Public Lecture Series. December 4, 2013 About the Talk: The following is an extract from the introduction to Prof. Thomas Metzinger's book The Ego Tunnel, written for a wider public. "In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self. But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self. It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness—that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object—if we don't come to terms with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences? There are other important issues in the quest to probe our inner nature—new, exciting theories about emotions, empathy, dreaming, rationality, recent discoveries about free will and the conscious control of our actions, even about machine consciousness—and they are all valuable, as the building blocks of a deeper understanding of ourselves. I will touch on many of them in this book. What we currently lack, however, is the big picture—a more general framework we can work with. The new mind sciences have generated a flood of relevant data but no model that can, at least in principle, integrate all these data. There is one central question we have to confront head on: Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts? Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality?" About the Speaker: Thomas Metzinger is currently Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study (FIAS). He is also Director of the Neuroethics Research Unit in Mainz and Director of the MIND Group at the FIAS. In 2008 he received a one-year Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study), is past president of the German Cognitive Science Society (2005-2007) and of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2009-2011). 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 in 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; also in paperback and as eBook). 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 are here http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/m...