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. — Thomas Metzinger Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action. — Thomas Metzinger Copy Share Image
Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all. — Thomas Metzinger Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions. — Thomas Metzinger Copy Share Image
