Brain Science Podcast, Episode 67: Thomas Metzinger explores Consciousness

I am a fan of Metzinger's work toward fully-embodied consciousness - great interview. He wants to get at the biggest issues in mind science - the meaning and causes of "self." Here is only a brief part of his answer to the question, "What is consciousness?"

So, the answer to your question is it is not one problem, it’s a whole bundle of problems. One is, for instance, what philosophers call the ‘unity of consciousness’—the problem of global integration. If you wake up in the morning and you become conscious, then one single world appears to you.

Why is it one? If the unity of consciousness experience gets lost, you usually have a serious psychiatric illness. It’s an achievement in its own right that we live in one world when we’re conscious—in one unified situation. This problem is so simple that most people overlook it.

Another example is what is a lived moment—this experiential fact that you are now present. There’s not only this multimodal scene—the room you’re in, the sounds you’re listening to—but there is a representation, not only of space and objects, but of time. You are located in a temporal order—there is a past and there is a future—but consciousness is always now. The ‘nowness’ of it all; that’s another problem that needs to be solved.

I’m, of course, as a philosopher, a fan of the biggest of them all. I think the most difficult problem is why is this subjective? What does that mean? It means that, as a target phenomenon for scientific research, consciousness is unique, because it is always tied to an individual first-person perspective. It is you who are experiencing all this. It is tied to a subjective point of view.

Chemical states, physical states, neurobiological states, neurocomputational states in your brain, they don’t have that property. They can be described from the outside—as philosophers say, from the third-person perspective. We can do objective science about neurocomputational properties of the conscious brain, and so forth. That’s not a principal problem.

But then there’s this mystery that they’re always someone’s experiences. And in the moment you say that, you flip from the third-person perspective into the first person perspective. We want to know what my experience actually is. And that is something we haven’t properly understood.

Science always deals with publically observable objects. But my very own sensation of brain, or my very own feeling of happiness and relaxation, is not a public object. It is, in a sense which we haven’t fully understood, subjective. That’s the problem I’m interested in.

His more basic answer, from his book, The Ego Tunnel, is: “consciousness is the appearance of a world.” You can read the transcript by clicking the link if you prefer reading to listening.

Thomas Metzinger explores Consciousness on BSP 67

Posted on March 9th, 2010 by Ginger Campbell, MD

The free podcast version of Brain Science Podcast 67 is now available. It is an interview with German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self and Being No One. Dr. Metzinger argues that any credible model for how the brain generates the mind must incorporate unusual human experiences, such as so-called out of body experiences (OBE), and psychiatric conditions. In this interview we explore how OBE and virtual reality experiments shed light on how the brain generates the sense of self that characterizes normal human experience.

Listen to Episode 67

Episode Transcript (Download PDF)

Subscribe to the Brain Science Podcast:

Links:

• Thomas Metzinger: University of Mainz, Wikipedia entry
• Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC)
• Olaf Blanke: Swiss scientist and physician who has demonstrated that out of body experiences (OBE) can be generated by electrical stimulation of the brain
• YouTube video of Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One lecture
• For more links download the free transcript of BSP 67.

Related Episodes of the Brain Science Podcast:

• BSP 21: A look at how our brain create body maps that may incorporate tools
• BSP 22: Interview with Christof Koch, author of The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• BSP 35: An introduction to Mirror Neurons
• BSP 55: Interview with philosopher Patricia Churchland
• BSP 57: (mention in the podcast)Interview with neuropsycologist Chris Frith, author of Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

References:

• The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger
• Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity by Thomas Metzinger
• How the Body Shapes the Mind by Shaun Gallagher
• Blanke, et al., “Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions,” Nature, 419:269-270 (2002) Click here for more papers by Olaf Blanke.
• Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out of Body Experiences by Susan Blackmore (click here for more publications from Susan Blackmore)
• O Blanke & T. Metzinger,”Full-Body Illusion and Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood,” Trends in Cognitive Neuroscience 13(1):7-13 (2009)
• T. Metzinger, “Out of Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a ‘Soul,’” Mind and Matter 3(1):57-84 (2005) Click for more papers by Thomas Metzinger.

Tags: Brain Science Podcast, Episode 67, Thomas Metzinger, Consciousness, Psychology, brain, mind, body, Dr. Ginger Campbell, The Ego Tunnel, The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Being No One, mental states, mental illness, ego, self