Thomas Metzinger Quotes
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As far as inner action is concerned, we are only rarely truly self-determined persons, for the major part of our conscious mental activity rather is an automatic, unintentional form of behavior on the subpersonal level.
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For a human being, to possess a consciously experienced first-person perspective means to have acquired a very specific functional profile and distinctive level of representational content in one's currently active phenomenal self-model: It has, episodically, become a dynamic inner model of a knowing self.
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Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.
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As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.
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The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".
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What many people don't see is that there are abundant examples of phenomenal opacity: It is one of the most interesting features of the human conscious model of reality that, first, it can contain elements that are not experienced as mind-independent, as unequivocally real, as immediately given, and second, that there is a "gradient of realness" in which one and the same content can be experienced transparently or in an opaque fashion.
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At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.
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A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.
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Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.
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Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.
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The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.
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When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.
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Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.
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You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.
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The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.
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If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little "Think me!" and our mind begins to wander.
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As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.
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One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust "out-of-the brain experience", a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.
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I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.
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Retribution is really a stone age concept.
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I believe that if we would carefully apply the distinction between transparency and opacity to the different layers of the human self-model, looking at self-consciousness in a much more careful and fine-grained manner, then we might also arrive at a new answer to your original question: What a "first-person perspective" really is.
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As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.
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I believe that gut feelings, the sense of balance, and spatial self-perception are so firmly coupled to our biological body that we will never be able to leave it experientially on a permanent basis.
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In ordinary life, the phenomenology of embodied emotions is an excellent example for dynamic changes between transparency and opacity: You can "directly perceive" that your wife is cheating you, or you can become aware of the possibility that maybe it is you who has a problem, that your "immediate" emotional representation of social reality might actually be a misrepresentation.
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I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.
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Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans, avoid risks, and treat our fellow human beings fairly - for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern ourselves.
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Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.
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Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.
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All attention is introspection.
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The self is not a thing, but a process.
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