Who Am I? 1

On the portal of the temple of Phoebus Apollo at Delphi at the south western spur of Mount Parnasus in the valley of Phocis, Greece, the site for most famous oracle in ancient Greece, spoken through Apollo's priestess called sibyl, there is an incription, "Know Thyself".

View of Delphi.

Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Columns of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece

 

How do we know ourselves? This has been a problem which has plagued philosophers,  theologians and sages for centuries. What is the subject in any sentence beginning with "I". Who and what is that "I"? What is its nature? Where is it located? New light is now thrown on this question in a book I just bought, "The Ego Tunnel" (2009) by Thomas Metzinger, who directs the Theoretical Philosophy Group and the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, a cognitive scientist and philosopher.

 

Metzinger thinks, like the great Buddha, that there is no objective entity called the "self".  He says, "Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self.". But the problem is not that modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience are about to shatter "the myth of the self", he says that "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 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.. When we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?"

 

To support his view, he relies upon new researches and theories about emotion, empathy, lucid dreaming, rationality, free will and the conscious control of action, even artificial intelligence or machine consciousness, as the building blocks of a deeper understanding of ourselves. He hopes to build a big picture and to integrate all the researches in the various spheres of brain science to form a general framework to answer the questions "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 entity thinking your thoughts? Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality"?"  To answer these questions, he proposes the metaphor of "The Ego Tunnel", the title of the book.  He starts his analysis and suggests his theory not from the point of view of the analytic philosophers such as Gottlieb Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein but the fine-grained and careful description of inner experience of such phenomena as meditation, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experience, phantom limbs, symptoms such as schizophrenia, Cotard's syndrome (where patients believe they no longer exist) as a phenomenological philosopher and cognitive scientist. In the light of his findings, he discussed what he calls the new "ethics of consciousness". because if we have a comprehensive theory of consciousness and develop sophisticated tools to alter the contents of our subjective experience, we need to think about what a good state of consciousness is: what kind consciousness do we want our children to have, to foster or to ban on ethical grounds? What state of consciousness can we properly inflict upon animals?

 

Metzinger starts off with an interesting experiment done by U of Pittsburg psychiatrists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen in 1998. The subjects of the experiement actually "experienced" an artificial limb as part of their body when after a minute or so of seeing an artificial rubber arm on a table being stroked when their own actual but invisible hand under that table is simultaneously stroked. The subjects will report that they feel that the "virtual arm" belongs to them and is part of their own body. Metzinger himself also underwent this experiment. He says that shortly before the onset of the "illusion" , ie. shortly before his "soul arm" "astral limb" slipped from the invisible physical arm into the rubber arm, he felt a strange tingling sensation in his shoulder. What is being activated in his brain at that point in time is what Metzinger calls the contents of "the phenomenal self-model " (PSM), the conscious model of the organism as a whole. It is called phenomenal because it refers to what is known "experientially" through the way the phenomenon appears to him.

 

To Metzinger, the PSM is probably one of nature's best inventions: "an efficient way to allow a biological organism to consciously conceive of itself and others as a whole...(which) enables the organism to interact with its internal world as well as the external environment in an intelligent and holistical manner." However, our PSM is unique to the human species because as we perceive an external object, we are capable of "representing the process of representation itself to ourselves as well" or we can catch ourself in the act of knowing: "we mentally represent ourselves as representational systems in phenomenological real time." It is this ability which turns us into thinkers of thoughts and the readers of our own and others's minds: " it allowed biological evolution to explode into cultural evolution." It enables us to understand one another through empathy and mindreading and by allowing us to externalize our minds through co-operation and culture, our sense of Self or Ego has enabled us to form complex societies.

 

The rubber hand or arm experiment is significant in a number of ways. First, we learn that whatever is part of our PSM is part of our conscious Ego and is endowed with a sense or feeling of "mineness": we feel that we "own" it and by implication that we can control it. In addition, we "identify" it as part of ourselves. Do we not do, or more accurately "feel" something similar with all other phenomena which we believe is "associated" with ourselves? Do we not have a similar or analogous "rubber body" or "image" which we regard or feel is part of ourselves? "Could one create a full-body analog of the rubber hand illusion? Could the entire self be transposed to a location outside of the body? ", asks Metzinger. There are numerous reports from parapsychologists of people claiming that they have a very robust feeling of being outside of their physical body in so-called out of body experiences (OBEs) during operations when they are under anaesthesia in which the subjects identify themselves with their illusionistic double floating above their actual physical bodies. Olaf Blanke, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, succeeded in triggering in his subjects OBEs by directly stimulating his subjects' brain with an electrode. Typically, there are two images, a visual one in which the patients see thenmselves lying in bed or on an operating table and the "felt" one in which they "feel" themselves hovering above or floating in space and interesting, this second body-model is the content of the patient's PSM: where he thinks or has the illusion that that is where his Ego is! In other "virtual reality" experiments, Metzinger finds that his subjects "transiently identified with a computer generated, external image of it". To him these experiments demonstrate that "the deeper, holistic sense of self ...is a form of conscious representational content" and that it can be selectively manipulated under carefully controlled experimental conditions.

 

Why does Metzinger use the metaphor "Ego Tunnel"?  He explains. "Conscious experience is like a tunnel...the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: they evolved for reasons of survival, not for duplicating the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the ongoing processs of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality."

 

(To be con'td)