Who am I? 2

In the book The Ego Tunnel, Metzinger explains what he means by " ordinary consciousness" of the external world. He says that whenever we successfully pursue the strategy of "creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious." One of the characteristics of this inner picture of external reality or what Metzinger calls a "world-simulation" is that it is so perfect that we fool even ourselves in that we do not even "realize" that it is in fact only an "image" of the external world generated by our own brain. But this is not the only image generated or created by our own brain. At the same time that we "perceive" the external world, we also simultaneously but unconsciously generate another image, an image of our body in relationship with that external world. In the third place, our brain will also generate a further image of what we regard as our body and the acts and thoughts and feelings of that body in the past and what it may intend to do in the future. Metzinger says that the"internal image of the person-as-a-whole" is "the phenomenal Ego" or ""the phenomenal self" or the "I" as it "appears in my conscious experience. As he says, "The phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image viz. the conscious self-model or PSM". By placing that PSM ""within" the model of the external world inside our mind, a centre is created and that centre is what we experience as ourselves or our phenomenal Ego. We always see the world through what philosophers calls a "first person perspective". But what is signficant is that we seldom think of or perceive the the external world "directly". When we think we are in direct contact with the external world, objectively, we are only in contact with our "subjective" image of that external world inside our brain. In that sense, we do have an inner perspective. We can use the word "I". We often live our conscious lives inside that Ego Tunnel. 

Phenomenologically, we do possess an "integrated inner image of ourselves" that is firmly anchored in our bodily sensations and our feelings". The world simulation or our subjective image of the external world will include as part of that external world an image of ourselves in some kind of relationship to that external world. Hence our image of the external world always already includes our experience of our own point of view. But an important characteristic of our view of the external world or of ourselves is that whether we think we are merely "perceiving" the external world or merely "experiencing"" our "self", our model of the external world or our model of ourselves inside our brain are ""transparent" ie. we do not normally realize or are conscious of the fact that all we are perceiving or experiencing is our "subjective image"of the external world or of ourselves in more or less the same way that we see a bird flying by outside of a window but we do not see the window itself. Thus we do not see our neurons firing away inside our brain at the moment we think we are perceiving the external world or perceiving our ourselves inside that external world but we see only what they "represent" to that theatre of our mind. Metzinger explains: ""A conscious world-model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model--we look right through it, directly into the world, as it were."

In a way, Metzinger's viewpoint is a bit like that of the idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley. The perceptions of our mind is always confined to what our mind allows us to see inside our brain. The external world is always and can only be perceived through the distorting mechanism of our own brain or mind. But whether or not our perspective of the external world or of our own "self" is distorted, Metzinger emphasizes the fact that we are seldom consciously aware of the relevant distorting mechanism of our own brain because we only see or perceives with them and in doing so, we see through them and as he says, "the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large part of the PSM in your brain is transparent. ".

To Metzinger, the Ego or the Self is simply the content of our PSM (our bodily sensations, our emotional state, our perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts) but we are NOT aware that all this is just "the content of simulation" inside our brain. We never perceive external reality as such, all we "perceive" are merely our own subjective "ïmage"of external reality. In the same manner, what we think of as our Ego is merely "a transparent image"of our "self" (the physical person as a whole) and we look right through it too. We do not see it but we see with it.   

Our Ego is merely a tool: our mental tool. " It is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others". Metzinger says that whenever the organism needs this tool, the brain activates a PSM and if the tool is no longer needed as in dreamless deep sleep, the tool is turned off. An important feature of this tool is that our Ego or Self is merely the result of "dynamic self-organization on many levels". He says that ultimately, "subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of persenting information about the world by letting it appear as if it were an Ego's knowledge. " But, he says that in fact, no such things as selves exist in the world: "A biological organism, as such is not a self. An Ego is not a self either but merely a form of representational content--namely the content of a transparent self-model activated in the organism's brain".

What does Metzinger mean by the word "tunnel" in the title of the book Ego Tunnel? He says, "yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms and in doing so, we unknowlingly construct our own individual world, which is our 'reality tunnel'"  As I said above, Metzinger says, "we are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions.". But we live in ignorance of such mechanism because "the construction process is largely invisible; in the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see, and most of us are completely unaware of this fact.". He says that "the whole idea of potentially being directly in touch with reality is a sort of romantic folklore; we know the world only by using representations, because (correctly) representing something is what knowing is."

Metzinger does not want to confuse his idea of the tunnel vision of our perception with what social psychologists call "confirmation bias" or our tendency to notice or to assign importance only to observations that confirm our beliefs and expectations and to ignore or filter out or rationalize away observations that do not. To him, it is possible for us to get outside of this tunnel. In this he differs from Bishop Berkeley. He says, "Knowledge is possible for instance through the co-operation and communication of large groups of people--scientific communities that design and test theories, constantly criticize one another, and exchange empirical data and new hypothesis. ". In short, the thinks that it is possible to obtain real or objective knowledge through the scientific method.

Metzinger studies human consciousness phenomenologically ie. he considers the phenomenal contents of our mental representations : how they feel to us from a first person perspective or what it is like subjectively, privately and inwardly to have them. e.g the quality of redness in a red rose or the amberness or sandalwoodness of a mixture of amber and sandalwood, our feeling of happiness or being relaxed etc when we are happy, relaxed etc. But to him all the scientific evidence suggest that the phenomenal content of our consciousness is determined not completely by the environment but mainly by the internal properties of our brain. Thus the relevant qualities are the same whether the rose is there in front of us or in our memory or in our imagination or in our dream. In principle, we can evoke the relevant feeling by stimulating the right combination of glomeruli (there are 2000 of them) in our olfatory bulb provided we had previously experienced it once. Since glomeruli takes input from one type or another of our olfatory cells, if the unified sensory quality of smelling sandalwood and amber typically involves activitating smell receptors cells of type 18, 93, 143 and 211 in our nose, then we would expect toget the same conscious experience of an identical odor by stimulating the corresponding glomeruli with an electrode. The question to Metzinger is: What is the minimally sufficient set of neural properties required to bring about the relevant conscious experience of say, redness, shape of the rose, the feeling of happiness or relaxation etc., in other words, what is the global neural corrrelate of consciousness (NCC)? Could we selectively elicit exactly the same phenomenon by doing even less, possibly at another location in the brain? Most neuroscientists and philosophers think so. And the same principle would apply for more complex states e.g. happiness plus relaxation. Their phenomenal content can be caused also by exposing ourselves to a psychoactive substance. Metzinger says, "The problem of consciousness is all about subjective experience: the structure of our inner life and not about knowledge of the external world.". Not only is there a specific NCC required to give rise to consciousness of specific qualities, there is also a global NCC, a mich larger set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole which underpins our experienced model of the world or the totality of everything we subjectively feel. If so, the incessant information flow in this global NCC is what creates the tunnel, the world in which we live our conscious life.What is this "I"? How does the general sense of selfhood arise or appear? This sense of consciousness of selfhood is the deepest form of inwardness, much deeper than just being "in the brian" or " in a simulated world in the brain" and is the Ego Tunnel.