In the last chapter of Being No One, Thomas Metzinger addresses the questions with which he introduced the book, a list that includes:
What is phenomenal selfhood? What, precisely, is the nonconceptual sense of ownership going along with the phenomenal experience of selfhood, or of “being someone”?
In the discussion, he makes a striking comment related to the reality of the self. If the phenomenal self-model (PSM) is “of a nonhallucinatory kind”:
…the system then represents certain aspects of reality as being parts of itself, and it does so correctly. What it achieves is not only self-experience but self-knowledge. (Metzinger 2004, p 607)
In reading this passage, I wondered how Metzinger can reconcile it with his claim that ‘no such things as selves exist in the world.’ Here he says that the system represents itself to itself by means of its PSM, and that it does so “correctly.” Metzinger certainly admits that systems exist. Are we not, then, such systems? Continue reading “Metzinger on the Unreality of the Self”