Rational Subject Quotes by Thomas Metzinger

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…

— Thomas Metzinger

At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then…

— Thomas Metzinger

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…

— Thomas Metzinger

You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.

— Thomas Metzinger

Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

— Thomas Metzinger

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…

— Thomas Metzinger

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…

— Thomas Metzinger

Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.

— Thomas Metzinger

Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.

— Thomas Metzinger

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…

— Thomas Metzinger

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…

— Thomas Metzinger

I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

— Thomas Metzinger