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Metzinger's Neurophilosophy

Matt the Poet

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I’ve just started Thomas Metzinger’s ‘Being No-One’, having been guided there by Peter Watts’ intriguing description of agnosia and other odd states of mind in his SF novel ‘Blindsight’.

I don’t intuitively agree with the conclusions stated in the blurb (I’m pretty convinced of the epistemological indivisibility of subjective states – I yam who I yam, as ‘twere) but I’m an amateur here and willing to change my mind. I’d be interested in any philosophers’ or neuroscientists’ views on his approach. Is he on an interesting track? Are there any caveats I should be aware of?
 
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Matt the Poet said:
I’ve just started Thomas Metzinger’s ‘Being No-One’, having been guided there by Peter Watts’ intriguing description of agnosia and other odd states of mind in his SF novel ‘Blindsight’.

I don’t intuitively agree with the conclusions stated in the blurb (I’m pretty convinced of the epistemological indivisibility of subjective states – I yam who I yam, as ‘twere) but I’m an amateur here and willing to change my mind. I’d be interested in any philosophers’ or neuroscientists’ views on his approach. Is he on an interesting track? Are there any caveats I should be aware of?
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Any tidbits you find interesting?

Please post them here so we don't have to read the whole thing.
 
Well, it's not very tidbitty, but from the intro

Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process - and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self model. You are such a system now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognise your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don't see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical words, the central claim of this book is that as you read thee lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain
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So yes, intrigued, but sceptical...
 
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I found this online:

http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/

Almost half way down the page are 2 youtube links which split an 18 minute talk by Metzinger on transparent self-models at TED. The webmaster describes the talk as "super-simple." :)

It's kind of hard to discuss a book I haven't read -- is there anything in the youtube video that you would like to discuss?

Some of what the author says in the video reminds me of Richard Dawkins's writings. In one of his books, Dawkins does a fantastic job describing how we map part but not all of the "real world" inside our brains so that we can make sense of the world around us. He uses as an example human vision and, IIRC, bats' echolocation.

I think because I've read some of Dawkins' books, I understood what Metzinger meant when he said in the youtube vide that "we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us" and that "our brains are virtual reality machines."

I'm sure not everything he said in his 700 + pages book was captured in that 18 minute video :D so I don't know if I would agree with everything he says -- but I didn't see anything to disagree with in the video.


ETA: I'm glad you started the thread. My city's library system doesn't have "Being No-One" in stock, but they do have his more current book "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self." I just put it on hold. It's less than 1/3 the length of "Being No-One", so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will still convey all of his take on the mind body question.
 
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Matt the Poet said:
Well, it's not very tidbitty, but from the intro

So yes, intrigued, but sceptical...
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I'm automatically skeptical of any compound word that contains either "neuro" or "philosophy", so I'm doubly skeptical here - and yet, that quoted passage sounds exactly right to me.

There's no such thing as a subjective state - subjective awareness is a process - so they can't be indivisible because they don't exist.
 
The one problem I have with the quoted text, and perhaps someone can help me, is that I do not know exactly what he is refuting. It sounds like an odd straw man is in there somewhere:
Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process - and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self model. You are such a system now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognise your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don't see it. But you see with it.
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He seems to be saying that there's something I'm perceiving about myself that's incorrect. But I'm having a hard time trying to map his description of the thing I'm perceiving to what I'm perceiving.
 
Summarizing some notes that I took from the videos:
We have a sense of ownership. In particular, there exists a sense of ownership of our body; in addition to that there is a mental model of our entire body plan. This is hard wired as evidenced by phenomena such as phantom limb syndrome.

We perceive the world as if we're looking at it through a window--we see the contents of the world in this sense (e.g., the computer screen, the tip of your nose), but we do not see the "window" itself (we don't see inside our heads, and we don't see the border between what we don't see in our heads and the world). This is the philosophical concept of transparency.

Our sense of selfhood is a consequence of the combination of our self model, including the sense of ownership, and transparency. Along with these two things necessarily comes the sense that there is an owner within our body plan that we are infinitely close to.​
Those are in my own words what Metzinger is proposing.

As I understand it, what he's describing is a sense of location of self. I cannot resolve this with his quoted text except in a sense in which the existence of an OOBE ipso facto disproves his notion that we cannot recognize this self-model as a model. But since his experiments with virtual reality video actually produce OOBE's, I'm fairly confident that this is an incorrect analysis of his claims.

So I'm basically confused about what he's talking about.
 
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yy2bggggs said:
The one problem I have with the quoted text, and perhaps someone can help me, is that I do not know exactly what he is refuting. It sounds like an odd straw man is in there somewhere:

He seems to be saying that there's something I'm perceiving about myself that's incorrect. But I'm having a hard time trying to map his description of the thing I'm perceiving to what I'm perceiving.
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The quoted passage struck me the same way: it seems almost trivially true. Of course everything we perceive is subjective, filtered by our consciousness, which is an emergent property of our brain. It's that filtering process which gives us the illusion of self.

The opposite view, I suppose, would be those who claim there's a soul or some "self" which exists or survives outside the brain and doesn't require a living brain to exist, but as far as I know, there's no convincing evidence of such a thing.

The only thing I'd quibble over is the final quoted sentence:

"the central claim of this book is that as you read thee lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain"

It can be read two ways.

One: there's a self-model activated by the brain, and, separately, a "yourself," and we get them mixed up (or confused with each other).

Two: There's a self-model activitated by the brain, which you mistakenly believe to be "yourself," but you're actually wrong (or confused).

The second one seems to fit best with what appears to be the premise of the book (and I'd agree with it).

The first one is what I thought it meant initially, but I hope not, since it seems to be introducing a separate, soul-like entity, a "yourself," which doesn't seem to follow with the rest of the argument.
 
Ah... this is much more complex and interesting.

Very long though. I'll need to comb back through this and take notes.

This video certainly helps me understand the others.
 
It's a nice piece but I didn't find anything new in it. Is it just philosophers catching up to neuroanatomists and cognitive science? I'm guessing there is more to the story not covered in this lecture.

Interesting that his friend is Damasio. I've read his stuff and it's wonderful.
 
Pup said:
"the central claim of this book is that as you read thee lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain"

It can be read two ways.

One: there's a self-model activated by the brain, and, separately, a "yourself," and we get them mixed up (or confused with each other).

Two: There's a self-model activitated by the brain, which you mistakenly believe to be "yourself," but you're actually wrong (or confused).

The second one seems to fit best with what appears to be the premise of the book (and I'd agree with it).

The first one is what I thought it meant initially, but I hope not, since it seems to be introducing a separate, soul-like entity, a "yourself," which doesn't seem to follow with the rest of the argument.
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Yeah, I think it's the second one. The key concept is the philosophical concept of "phenomenological transparency". That there's a self-model in the brain is uncontroversial, but when you link it to phenomenological transparency it becomes a bit clearer how it works.

IOW, our experience of the world is "transparent" in that we aren't aware of the machinery by which the brain is modelling the world, we're just feel we're directly aware of the world in a naive realistic sense.

Well, we have the same relation to the internal self-model - we aren't aware of the process by which the brain is modelling the body-in-the-world, we just feel directly in contact with our "selves" (even though there are no such things, in reality, just bodies and brains).

Think of seeing a tree; feeling ourselves is like seeing the tree. In both cases the experience is mediated by a brain-creation that bears no relation to the object (i.e. neurons firing are not in any way like a tree, nor like the self that we feel ourselves to be). We simply aren't aware of the brain stuff going on (it's phenomenologically transparent), we just feel we are in direct contact with, in one case, the tree, in the other case, our self.

I think Metzinger is brilliant. If one likes Dennett on consciousness, one will love Metzinger, they're kind of on the same wavelength, Metzinger basically sort of develops a Dennettian view further and in a more detailed way, in the specific area of self consciousness.

It's also important from the particular point of view of JREF stuff, in that it provides a good explanation for why some woo things are subjectively convincing to their experiencers. He has a paper in which he goes into an explanation for things like OOBEs, visionary experiences ("Astral Travel"), some types of mystical experience, and the concept of the Soul, and shows how that concept may have developed from such experiences.
 
Wow, I just finished Blindsight a few weeks ago.

What struck me about the premise is that Watts is actually in complete disagreement with Metzinger and he doesn't even realize it.

Watts is trying to say that our conscious self is an accidental, almost parasitic, property of evolution. But if I understand Metzinger correctly, he is claiming that our conscious self is simply the emergent behavior of the components underlying it -- "the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self model. "

Which is my primary beef with the book -- Watts whole premise is that the aliens are conscious information processing systems operating under some kind of self model (all intelligent entities must be such systems, otherwise they could not operate ) that don't have a subjective self. In other words, that the aliens are p-zombies.

Now I might find the idea of p-zombies being the mortal enemies of self aware/conscious non-zombies, except for the fact that I have spent years explaining to people why the notion of a p-zombie is inconsistent.
 
gurugeorge said:
Here's a precis of his big book. He's knocked out the extensive examples and counter-arguments against other views, etc., and just presented his raw view here.

http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/publikationen/precis.pdf
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Hmmm... I just had a brilliant idea for an invention.

It is round and flat with a rod through the centre around which it can turn.

You can put it on four corners or a platform and move things around on it easily.

I think I will call it the wheel.
 
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