I spent a lot of my developmental years academically studying political theory and history, yet I would often cheat on these subjects with cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. Almost all my free time would go towards obsessively learning about the brain (from a functional perspective) and consciousness (from a representationalist perspective). You could, almost always, find me in a dim-lit London coffee shop on the weekend, tucked away in some corner delving into a book about either cognitive neuroscience or philosophy.
These are some of the questions that continuously bounced around in my mind:
What is it about brain function that gives rise to thoughts and are there particular kinds of neurons involved?
Can I prove that I exist outside of my own subjective experience?
If the human brain is the site of consciousness, does reality exist outside of my brain's perception of reality?
How does one define a 'self'?
While I find Steve Pinker's computational theory of the mind wildly fascinating, no academic has drawn me in as much as Thomas Metzinger. Metzinger is world-renowned for his interdisciplinary approach to classical philosophical questions related to consciousness and the relationshp between the mind and body.
Metzinger grips you, firstly, with his assertion that there is no such thing as a self. On his view, conscious experience is not only an internal construct, but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This means that the self is a result of you mentally representing yourself as representational system in phenomenological real-time.
Reality is thus a tunnel, since what we see and hear, or what we feel, smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there.
In case I've lost you, let me explain this in layman's terms.
There is no such thing as a self because all that exists are phenomenal selves which appear in conscious experience.
A phenomenal self is not a thing, but an ongoing process.
This challenges everything that we know about a consciously experienced first-person perspective because it directly addresses and solves the puzzle of how subjectivity emerges out of objective events in the natural world.
Metzinger's ultimate epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience results from the emergence of a phenomenal self and he does this by embarking on a path few before him have walked — by building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind. It's so innovative and refreshing that I spent much of my early twenties in a persistent state of excitement simply due to his theories.
People ordinarily get wrapped up in so many insubstantial things. Netflix shows. Interpersonal drama. Work-related stress. Blah Blah Blah. But from a young age, I always found myself fixated with questions related to consciousness. They followed me around everywhere I went and occupied a tremendous amount of mental storage.
I wasn't one of those Matrix-loving, conspiricy theorists who after a bong hit would raise questions like "Is reality even real?". No. My quest has been far more related to two major epistemic targets: the phenomenal self and the emergence of a first-person perspective.
Why? Well, if a phenomenal self is a representation of a self, generated by a self, and embedded into its representation of the world, then your mind is a vehicle for content.
Your brain creates a model of the world from sensory data and is then unable to see this as a model it has created, which makes your brain invisible to itself. In fact, you are only ever in contact with its content. Think of your brain as a permanently running online simulation that you are unable to recognise as something that you have created in your mind.
If the brain was not invisible to itself, we would lose ourselves in the myriad of micro-events taking place in our brains at every second and all that would be left is a mind exploding into endless loops of self-exploration.
The self is thus nothing more than the content of the phenomenological self-model. The first person pronoun "I" doesn't refer to an object like a ball or a car, it just points to the speaker of the current sentance because there is no thing in the brain or outside of the world which is us. We are processes.
It's not as radical an idea as you would think because most cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers subscribe to the notion that there is no thing like the self which can exist independently of the brain, so what does the metaphysical self really refer to?
The nature and mechanism of conscious processing is arguably one of the most intriguing questions in 21st-century neuroscience. Yet if you look at the properties that information-processing systems must possess in order to become phenomenal representations, then you'll notice that the self is a very special kind of representational content. In a certain sense, you are the the content of your phenomenal self, but you neither have nor are a self. Rather, the self is a complex brain state and an integrated process.
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