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Lecture 3      Last modified on Mon Feb 4 10:07:25 2008

Lecture 3: the phenomenal Self

— the tension between phenomenology and neuroscience

— the nature of experience

— the first-person perspective analyzed

— the outcome: a thorough understanding of the phenomenal Self

phenomenology

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phenomenology

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phenomenology

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phenomenology

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the tension between phenomenology and neuroscience

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused — oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon [...] but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.

G. Egan, Orphanogenesis (1997)
You enter the brain through the eye, march up the optic nerve, round and round the cortex, looking behind every neuron, and then, before you know it, you emerge into daylight on the spike of a motor nerve impulse, scratching your head and wondering where the self is.

D. C. Dennett, Elbow Room (1984)

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questions arising

  1. What makes a "mere" physical process an experience for someone?

  2. What makes a "mere" physical system a subject, or an experiencer?

  3. What does having a first-person perspective on an experience consist of?

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the first-person perspective

The four key components of phenomenal first-person experience:

agency, or sense of initiative;

mineness, or sense of ownership;

perspectivalness, or the perception of phenomenal space as being organized around the self;

selfhood, or the conscious experience of being someone.

  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the first-person perspective

  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

the first-person perspective

  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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multi-perspective and plenoptic vision

[cf. the plenoptic framework]

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sensory substitution

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inducing OBE (Ehrsson, 2007)

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inducing OBE (Ehrsson, 2007)

Left: The setup used to induce the out-of-body illusion.
Right: The SCRs from the 12 participants when the illusory body was "hurt." Mean values and standard deviations (error bars) are presented.

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inducing OBE (Metzinger et al., 2007)

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the first-person perspective (Metzinger)

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the first-person perspective

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.
    2. The disposition of matter and energy in the world is accessible to the brain exclusively through the mediation of its sensory apparatus (which includes both the five external senses and the various interoceptive channels). No matter how veridical some of the information provided by these senses is, the representations they feed into are necessarily virtual computational constructs.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the first-person perspective

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.
    3. The use of the virtual representations generated by the senses often involves simulation of events or situations (scene perception; language comprehension). Simulation is also central to planning and control (intended actions, etc.).

    The brain simulates the world as best as it can because the overarching evolutionary constraint on a cognitive agent is controlling the world so as to achieve optimal outcomes, and optimal control provably requires modeling the controlled system (Conant & Ashby, 1970).

    Note that an embodied and situated agent is an integral part of the world, and so must be simulated along with it by the agent's cognitive system.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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Conant and Ashby (1970)

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the first-person perspective

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.
    3. According to Metzinger (2003), the phenomenal first-person experience works like a total flight simulator — a virtual reality rig that simulates the entire world along with the pilot, the latter being a model (a simulation) of the system itself.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the first-person perspective

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.
    4. To avoid infinite regress (trying to represent a system that represents a system that represents...), the model of the world (which includes a model of the system itself) is taken to be the "last word" — the ultimate reality.

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the first-person perspective

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.
    4. "The transparency of the self-model is a special form of inner darkness. It consists in the fact that the representational character of the contents of self-consciousness is not accessible to subjective experience." — Metzinger (2003).

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the first-person perspective

  1. The experienced reality is virtual.

  2. The experienced reality is a simulation of the world.

  3. The simulation is not recognized by the system as such.

  4. The part of the simulation that represents the system itself is special.
    5. The represented reality contains one component that differs from all others in being always present. This self-model — the only representational structure that is fed by a continuous source of internally generated (interoceptive) input — is the phenomenal Self.
  • agency

  • mineness

  • perspectivalness

  • selfhood

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the Self demystified

What we have been calling "the" self in the past is not a substance, an unchangeable essence, or a thing (i.e., an "individual" in the sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representational content: the content of a phenomenally transparent system-model. It is the content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system using it.

T. Metzinger, Being No One (2003)

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the Self demystified

What we have been calling "the" self in the past is not a substance, an unchangeable essence, or a thing (i.e., an "individual" in the sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representational content: the content of a phenomenally transparent system-model. It is the content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system using it.

T. Metzinger, Being No One (2003)

There is no whole self.

J. L. Borges, The Nothingness of Personality (1922)

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the Self demystified

What we have been calling "the" self in the past is not a substance, an unchangeable essence, or a thing (i.e., an "individual" in the sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representational content: the content of a phenomenally transparent system-model. It is the content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system using it.

T. Metzinger, Being No One (2003)

There is no whole self.

J. L. Borges, The Nothingness of Personality (1922)

Therefore, O Sariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no volition, no consciousness.

Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra
The Great Heart Wisdom Sutra