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…

— Thomas Metzinger

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

— 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…

— 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,…

— 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…

— 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…

— Thomas Metzinger

One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust…

— 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…

— 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

A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice…

— Thomas Metzinger

“First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious,…

— Thomas Metzinger

Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans,…

— Thomas Metzinger

Subjective time flows forward, the phenomenal self is embedded into this flow, an inner history unfolds. That it is why it is…

— Thomas Metzinger

Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual…

— Thomas Metzinger

Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save…

— Thomas Metzinger

The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and…

— Thomas Metzinger

Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.

— Thomas Metzinger

When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are…

— Thomas Metzinger

“I believe the human self-model was successful because it installed your social group as an ideal observer in your mind, and to…

— Thomas Metzinger

As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search…

— Thomas Metzinger

The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see…

— Thomas Metzinger

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your…

— Thomas Metzinger