O
ur brains represent ourselves, to ourselves, by means of a Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM). According to Thomas Metzinger, the PSM is characterized by transparency, and a phenomenal quality of ‘mineness.’ Its transparency consists in our unawareness of it as a model. We look and act ‘right through it’ – we take our models for our real selves. ‘Mineness’ is a quality that infuses all of our experience which we take to be experience of ourselves. Although Metzinger uses the terms “mineness” and “ownership,” it is more than an experience of ownership. I think “me-ness” aptly captures what Metzinger is after. Continue reading “A Special Form of Darkness: Metzinger on Subjectivity”
Metzinger: Being No One
Being No One is a substantial work by German philosopher Thomas Metzinger about “consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective.” Its main thesis “is that no such things as selves exist in the world. Nobody ever was or had a self.”
I have spent some time with the book, making, from its 634 densely-printed pages, 104 pages of notes. After all that, I still question Metzinger’s ‘main thesis.’ But I have no doubts about the value of the book. It irrevocably raises the standard for what philosophy of mind must explain. In its early pages, Metzinger echoes Paul Churchland’s complaint, that “theoretical approaches to the mental, still intuitively rooted in folk psychology, have generated very little growth of knowledge in the last twenty-five centuries.” Being No One goes a long way towards burying that era. Continue reading “Metzinger: Being No One”