The No‐Self Alternative

Immediate transfer of synesthesia to a novel inducer.

In synesthesia, a certain stimulus (e.g. grapheme) is associated automatically and consistently with a stable perceptual-like experience (e.g. color). These associations are acquired in early childhood and remain robust throughout the lifetime. Synesthetic associations can transfer to novel inducers in adulthood as one learns a second language that uses another writing system. However, it is not known how long this transfer takes. We found that grapheme-color associations can transfer to novel graphemes after only a 10-minute writing exercise. Most subjects experienced synesthetic associations immediately after learning a new Glagolitic grapheme. Using a Stroop task, we provide objective ev…

Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood.

We highlight the latest research on body perception and self-consciousness, but argue that despite these achievements, central aspects have remained unexplored, namely, global aspects of bodily self-consciousness. Researchers investigated central representations of body parts and actions involving these, but neglected the global and unitary character of self-consciousness, the ‘I’ of experience and behaviour. We ask, what are the minimally sufficient conditions for the appearance of a phenomenal self, that is, the fundamental conscious experience of being someone? What are necessary conditions for self-consciousness in any type of system? We offer conceptual clarifications, discuss recent e…

Why are out-of-body experiences interesting for philosophers?

After decades of only sparse scientific interest, we are currently witnessing a renaissance of empirical research into out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and full-body illusions. Being a philosopher of mind, I obviously have only a limited judgment of how good this research actually is from a purely scientific point of view. What I can do, however, is to draw attention to a series of theoretical aspects that make OBEs a particularly relevant target of investigation in the ongoing search for the neural correlate of self-consciousness and in the wider context of an empirically grounded theory of the human mind. Firstly, and most basically, this type of research has a great potential for conceptua…

Self-modeling epistemic spaces and the contraction principle

What Graziano and colleagues describe as the “attention schema” really is one special case of what I have called the “phenomenal model of the intentionality relation” (PMIR) since 1993 (Metzinger, ...

The emergence of a shared action ontology: building blocks for a theory.

To have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too. It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions. It decomposes target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant. We will investigate which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process, by answering to the following questions: What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and its representational deep structure, in particular of t…

Inferences are just folk psychology

To speak of “inferences,” “interpretations,” and so forth is just folk psychology. It creates new homunculi, and it is also implausible from a purely phenomenological perspective. Phenomenal volition must be described in the conceptual framework of an empirically plausible theory of mental representation. It is a non sequitur to conclude from dissociability that the functional properties determining phenomenal volition never make a causal contribution. I have offered an alternative interpretation of some of Dan Wegner’s most relevant data elsewhere (Metzinger 2003, p. 506ff), and will confine myself to three conceptual points here. Wegner’s project could be further strengthened by eliminati…

Grounding the self in action

Consciousness and cognition are phenomena that seem to be inextricably bound to an individual first-person perspective: at least in standard situations, there is not only conscious experience, but also an experiencing self. And there is not only thought as such, but a thinking self as well. Why is there not only the flow of experience, but also someone—someone who has these experiences? And why do most thoughts not just occur in a free-floating way, like clouds in the sky, but seem to originate from—and within—a thinking self, a self somehow mentally portrayed as an independent cause in itself, a cognitive agent? Presently, in a number of different disciplines, two general answers seem to s…

Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology

This paper has a critical and a constructive part. The first part formulates a political demand, based on ethical considerations: Until 2050, there should be a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology, strictly banning all research that directly aims at or knowingly risks the emergence of artificial consciousness on post-biotic carrier systems. The second part lays the first conceptual foundations for an open-ended process with the aim of gradually refining the original moratorium, tying it to an ever more fine-grained, rational, evidence-based, and hopefully ethically convincing set of constraints. The systematic research program defined by this process could lead to an incremental re…

Radical disruptions of self-consciousness

This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.

The evolution of evolvability

Ever since Ruth Garrett Millikan burst on the scene with her famous 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories [1] she has continued to make substantial contributions, in a remarkably sustained effort that significantly shaped the theoretical landscape in a number of fast-moving fields, from cognitive science to the philosophies of mind, language and biology [1–3]. One of her many achievements lies in the development of a new theoretical approach to cognitive semantics, which philosophers know under the heading of ‘teleofunctionalism’.

Of course they do

The Minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire (MPE-92M): Towards a phenomenological profile of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators

Objective To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators. Methods An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Results Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were usable. Participants had a median age of 52 years (range: 17–88) and were evenly split between men and women (48.5% vs 50.0%). The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3%), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4%) and did not regularly use any psychoactive s…

Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research1

This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of “minimal phenomenal selfhood,” which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and ful…

What Is the Specific Significance of Dream Research for Philosophy of Mind?

Three examples: Altered states as contrast classes, self-model phase transitions in lucidity, and the devastating epistemological consequences of cognitive corruption.

Empirical perspectives from the self-model theory of subjectivity: a brief summary with examples

Abstract A concise sketch of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT; Metzinger, 2003a), aimed at empirical researchers. Discussion of some candidate mechanisms by which self-awareness could appear in a physically realized information-processing system like the brain, using empirical examples from various scientific disciplines. The paper introduces two core-concepts, the “phenomenal self-model” (PSM) and the “phenomenal model of the intentionality relation” (PMIR), developing a representationalist analysis of the conscious self and the emergence of a first-person perspective.

Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference

A representationalist analysis of strong first-person phenomena is developed (Baker 1998), and it is argued that conscious, cognitive self-reference can be naturalized under this representationalist analysis. According to this view, the phenomenal first-person perspective is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a cognitive first-person perspective. Cognitive self-reference always is reference to the phenomenal content of a transparent self-model. The concepts of phenomenal transparency and introspection are clarified. More generally, I suggest that the concepts of “phenomenal opacity” and “phenomenal transparency” are interesting instruments for analyzing conscious, self-represen…

Why Is Mind-Wandering Interesting for Philosophers?

This chapter explores points of contact between philosophy of mind and scientific approaches to spontaneous thought. While offering a series of conceptual instruments that might prove helpful for researchers on the empirical research frontier, it begins by asking what the explanandum for theories of mind-wandering is, how one can conceptually individuate single occurrences of this specific target phenomenon, and how one might arrive at a more fine-grained taxonomy. The second half of this contribution sketches some positive proposals as to how one might understand mind-wandering on a conceptual level, namely, as a loss of mental autonomy resulting in involuntary mental behavior, as a highly…

Commentary on Jakab's “Ineffability of Qualia”

Zoltan Jakab has presented an interesting conceptual analysis of the ineffability of qualia in a functionalist and classical cognitivist framework. But he does not want to commit himself to a certain metaphysical thesis on the ontology of consciousness or qualia. We believe that his strategy has yielded a number of highly relevant and interesting insights, but still suffers from some minor inconsistencies and a certain lack of phenomenological and empirical plausibility. This may be due to some background assumptions relating to the theory of mental representation employed. Jakab's starting assumption is that there is no linguistic description of a given experience such that understanding t…

The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess …

The Family-Resemblances Framework for Mind-Wandering Remains Well Clad

Christoff et al. [1] reject our family-resemblances framework for mind-wandering research [2] and instead seek to characterize mind-wandering with a necessary defining feature. As an example, they point to their ‘dynamic framework’ [3] that defines mind-wandering as thoughts that ‘proceed in a relatively free, unconstrained fashion.’ We outline three primary points of disagreement with their commentary and two points of clarification on the family-resemblances framework.

How does the brain encode epistemic reliability? Perceptual presence, phenomenal transparency, and counterfactual richness

AbstractSeth develops a convincing and detailed internalist alternative to the sensorimotor-contingency theory of perceptual phenomenology. However, there are remaining conceptual problems due to a semantic ambiguity in the notion of “presence” and the idea of “subjective veridicality.” The current model should be integrated with the earlier idea that experiential “realness” and “mind-independence” are determined by the unavailability of earlier processing stages to attention. Counterfactual richness and attentional unavailability may both be indicators of the overall processing level currently achieved, a functional property that normally correlates with epistemic reliability. Perceptual p…

Zehn Jahre Neuroethik des pharmazeutischen kognitiven Enhancements – Aktuelle Probleme und Handlungsrichtlinien für die Praxis

Ein auswertender Uberblick uber die Entwicklung der Neuroethik des pharmazeutischen kognitiven Enhancements (PCE) innerhalb der letzten zehn Jahre, mit einem Schwerpunkt auf der Situation in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Der Artikel benennt die wichtigsten begrifflichen Probleme, aktuelle Substanzen und zentrale ethisch-juristische Fragestellungen; am Ende werden allererste Handlungsrichtlinien und Empfehlungen fur die Politikgestaltung formuliert.

Transfer of synesthetic experience

Unconscious integration of multisensory bodily inputs in the peripersonal space shapes bodily self-consciousness

International audience; Recent studies have highlighted the role of multisensory integration as a key mechanism of self-consciousness. In particular, integration of bodily signals within the peripersonal space (PPS) underlies the experience of the self in a body we own (self-identification) and that is experienced as occupying a specific location in space (self-location), two main components of bodily self-consciousness (BSC). Experiments investigating the effects of multisensory integration on BSC have typically employed supra-threshold sensory stimuli, neglecting the role of unconscious sensory signals in BSC, as tested in other consciousness research. Here, we used psychophysical techniq…