The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self 

by Thomas Metzinger

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Last annotated on January 9, 2015

INTRODUCTION 

In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self.  Read more at location 70

There is one central question we have to confront head on: Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts? Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality? This is the heart of the mystery.  Read more at location 80

The best philosophers in the field clearly are analytical philosophers, those in the tradition of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein: In the past fifty years, the strongest contributions have come from analytical philosophers of mind. However, a second aspect has been neglected too much: phenomenology, the fine-grained and careful description of inner experience as such. In particular, altered states of consciousness (such as meditation, lucid dreaming, or out-of-body experiences) and psychiatric syndromes (such as schizophrenia or Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients may actually believe they do not exist) should not be philosophical taboo zones. Quite the contrary: If we pay more attention to the wealth and the depth of conscious experience, if we are not afraid to take consciousness seriously in all of its subtle variations and borderline cases, then we may discover exactly those conceptual insights we need for the big picture.  Read more at location 87

THE PHENOMENAL SELF-MODEL 

Before I introduce the Ego Tunnel, the central metaphor that will guide the discussion from here onward, it will be helpful to consider an experiment that strongly suggests the purely experiential nature of the self. In 1998, University of Pittsburgh psychiatrists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen conducted a now-classic experiment in which healthy subjects experienced an artificial limb as part of their own body.1 The subjects observed a rubber hand lying on the desk in front of them, with their own corresponding hand concealed from their view by a screen. The visible rubber hand and the subject’s unseen hand were then synchronously stroked with a probe. The experiment is easy to replicate: After a certain time (sixty to ninety seconds, in my case), the famous rubber-hand illusion emerges. Suddenly, you experience the rubber hand as your own, and you feel the repeated strokes in this rubber hand. Moreover, you feel a full-blown “virtual arm”—that is, a connection from your shoulder to the fake hand on the table in front of you.  Read more at location 106

What you feel in the rubber-hand illusion is what I call the content of the phenomenal self-model (PSM)—the conscious model of the organism as a whole that is activated by the brain. (“Phenomenal” is used here, and throughout, in the philosophical sense, as pertaining to what is known purely experientially, through the way in which things subjectively appear to you.) The content of the PSM is the Ego.  Read more at location 117

The PSM of Homo sapiens is probably one of nature’s best inventions. It is an efficient way to allow a biological organism to consciously conceive of itself (and others) as a whole. Thus it enables the organism to interact with its internal world as well as with the external environment in an intelligent and holistic manner. Most animals are conscious to one degree or another, but their PSM is not the same as ours. Our evolved type of conscious self-model is unique to the human brain, in that by representing the process of representation itself, we can catch ourselves—as Antonio Damasio would call it—in the act of knowing. We mentally represent ourselves as representational systems, in phenomenological real-time. This ability turned us into thinkers of thoughts and readers of minds, and it allowed biological evolution to explode into cultural evolution.  Read more at location 127

There are typically two representations of one’s body in these experiences: the visual one (the sight of your own body, lying on the bed, say, or on an operating table) and the felt one, in which you feel yourself to be hovering above or floating in space. Interestingly, this second body-model is the content of the PSM. This is where the Ego is. In a series of virtual-reality experiments, Olaf, his PhD student Bigna Lenggenhager, and I attempted to create artificial OBEs and full-body illusions (see chapter 3).2 During these illusions, subjects localized themselves outside their body and transiently identified with a computer-generated, external image of it. What these experiments demonstrate is that the deeper, holistic sense of self is not a mystery immune to scientific exploration—it is a form of conscious representational content, and it can be selectively manipulated under carefully controlled experimental conditions.  Read more at location 149

****  I use one central metaphor for conscious experience: the “Ego Tunnel.” Conscious experience is like a tunnel. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us.  Read more at location 156

the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality. Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious. First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also our relationship to the past and the future, as well as to other conscious beings. The internal image of the person-as-a-whole is the phenomenal Ego, the “I” or “self ” as it appears in conscious experience; therefore, I use the terms “phenomenal Ego” and “phenomenal self ” interchangeably.  Read more at location 161

In ordinary states of consciousness, there is always someone having the experience—someone consciously experiencing himself as directed toward the world, as a self in the act of attending, knowing, desiring, willing, and acting. There are two major reasons for this. First, we possess an integrated inner image of ourselves that is firmly anchored in our feelings and bodily sensations; the world-simulation created by our brains includes the experience of a point of view. Second, we are unable to experience and introspectively recognize our self-models as models; much of the self-model is, as philosophers might say, transparent.3 Transparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us.  Read more at location 171

****  (Note:  nature of Self)  The central claim of this book—and the theory behind it, the self-model theory of subjectivity—is that the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large part of the PSM in your brain is transparent. The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality—and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You—the physical person as a whole—look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.  Read more at location 178

Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world by letting it appear as if it were an Ego’s knowledge. But no such things as selves exist in the world. A biological organism, as such, is not a self. An Ego is not a self, either, but merely a form of representational content—namely, the content of a transparent self-model activated in the organism’s brain.  Read more at location 188

All evidence now points to the conclusion that phenomenal content is determined locally, not by the environment at all but by internal properties of the brain only. Moreover, the relevant properties are the same regardless of whether the red rose is there in front of you or merely imagined or dreamed about. The subjective sandalwood-and-amber experience doesn’t require incense, it doesn’t even require a nose; in principle it can also be elicited by stimulating the right combination of glomeruli in your olfactory bulb. Glomeruli (there are some two thousand of them) take input from one type or another of your olfactory receptor cells. If the unified sensory quality of smelling sandalwood and amber typically involves activating smell receptor cells of type 18, 93, 143, and 211 in your nose, then we would expect to get the same conscious experience—an identical odor—by stimulating the corresponding glomeruli with an electrode. The question is, What is the minimally sufficient set of neural properties?  Read more at location 221

One way of looking at the Ego Tunnel is as a complex property of the global neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). The NCC is that set of neurofunctional properties in your brain sufficient to bring about a conscious experience.  Read more at location 234

PART ONE THE CONSCIOUSNESS PROBLEM 

ONE THE APPEARANCE OF A WORLD 

Consciousness is the appearance of a world. The essence of the phenomenon of conscious experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: If you are conscious, a world appears to you.  Read more at location 253

****  What sets human consciousness apart from other biologically evolved phenomena is that it makes a reality appear within itself. It creates inwardness; the life process has become aware of itself.  Read more at location 259

Judging from the available data on animal brains and evolutionary continuity, the appearance of worlds in biological nervous systems is a recent phenomenon, perhaps only a few million years old. In Darwinian evolution, an early form of consciousness might have arisen some 200 million years ago in the primitive cerebral cortices of mammals, giving them bodily awareness and the sense of a surrounding world and guiding their behavior. My intuition is that birds, reptiles, and fish have long had some sort of awareness too. In any case, an animal that cannot reason or speak a language can certainly have transparent phenomenal states—and that is all it takes to make a world appear in consciousness. Such well-known consciousness researchers and theoretical neurobiologists as Anil Seth, Bernard Baars, and D. B. Edelman have established seventeen criteria for brain structures subserving consciousness, and the evidence for the existence of such structures not only in mammals but also in birds and potentially in octopi is overwhelming. The empirical evidence for animal consciousness is now far beyond any reasonable doubt.  Read more at location 260

The most fascinating feature of the human mind, perhaps, is not simply that it can sometimes be conscious, or even that it allows for the emergence of a PSM. The truly remarkable fact is that we can also attend to the content of our PSM and form concepts about it. We can communicate about it with one another, and we can experience this as our own activity. The process of attending to our thoughts and emotions, to our perceptions and bodily sensations, is itself integrated into the self-model.  Read more at location 274

I edited a collection of philosophical articles entitled Conscious Experience .3 When one of my ASSC cofounders, Australian philosopher David Chalmers, and I compiled the bibliography, spanning the period 1970-1995, it contained about a thousand entries. Ten years later, when I updated this bibliography for the fifth German edition, it had almost twenty-seven hundred entries. At this point, I gave up my attempt to include all of the new literature on consciousness; it was simply no longer possible.  Read more at location 295

We have learned how great the fear of reductionism is, in the humanities as well as among the general public, and how immense the market is for mysterianism. The straightforward philosophical answer to the widespread fear that philosophers or scientists will “reduce consciousness” is that reduction is a relationship between theories, not phenomena. No serious empirical researcher and no philosopher wants to “reduce consciousness”; at best, one theory about how the contents of conscious experience arose can be reduced to another theory. Our theories about phenomena change, but the phenomena stay the same. A beautiful rainbow continues to be a beautiful rainbow even after it has been explained in terms of electromagnetic radiation. Adopting a primitive scientistic ideology would be just as bad as succumbing to mysterianism. Furthermore, most people would agree that the scientific method is not the only way of gaining knowledge.  Read more at location 300

We have also come to understand that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing affair, a phenomenon that either does or does not exist. It is a graded phenomenon and comes in many different shades. Consciousness is also not a unitary phenomenon but has many discernible aspects: memory, attention, feelings, the perception of color, self-awareness, and higher-order thought. Nevertheless, the essence of the phenomenon—what I call the appearance of a world—seems to be preserved throughout. One of the essential features of consciousness is that it situates you in this world. When you wake up in the morning, you experience yourself as existing at a specific time, at a single location, and embedded in a scene: A single and integrated situation emerges.  Read more at location 311

The conscious brain is a biological machine—a reality engine—that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all. It is just as your physics teacher in high school told you: Out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. Most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality. What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color. Phenomenal color. Appearance. For your conscious eyes only. Still, this is only the beginning. There is no clean one-to-one mapping of consciously experienced colors to physical properties “out there.” Many different mixtures of wavelengths can cause the same sensation of apricot-pink  Read more at location 335

Converging data from modern consciousness research show that what is common to all possible conscious sensations of apricot-pink is not so much the existence of an object “out there” as a highly specific pattern of activation in your brain. In principle, you could have this experience without eyes, and you could even have it as a disembodied brain in a vat.  Read more at location 352

the flow of experience certainly exists, and cognitive neuroscience has shown that the process of conscious experience is just an idiosyncratic path through a physical reality so unimaginably complex and rich in information that it will always be hard to grasp just how reduced our subjective experience is. While we are drinking in all the colors, sounds, and smells—the diverse range of our emotions and sensory perceptions—it’s hard to believe that all of this is merely an internal shadow of something inconceivably richer. But it is.  Read more at location 362

the unified sensations of its color, weight, and texture—is just a shadow, a low-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional object “out there.” It is an image, a representation that can be described as a region in your neural state-space. This state-space itself may well have millions of dimensions; nevertheless, the physical reality you navigate with its help has an inconceivably higher number of dimensions.  Read more at location 366

What is the fire that causes the projection of flickering shadows of consciousness, dancing as activation patterns on the walls of your neural cave? The fire is neural dynamics. The fire is the incessant, self-regulating flow of neural information-processing, constantly perturbed and modulated by sensory input and cognition. The wall is not a two-dimensional surface but the high-dimensional phenomenal state-space of human Technicolor phenomenology.6 Conscious experiences are full-blown mental models in the representational space opened up by the gigantic neural network in our heads—and because this space is generated by a person possessing a memory and moving forward in time, it is a tunnel.  Read more at location 380

****  The idea is that the content of consciousness is the content of a simulated world in our brains, and the sense of being there is itself a simulation. Our conscious experience of the world is systematically externalized because the brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in a world outside my brain. Everything we know about the human brain today indicates that the experience of being outside the brain, and not in a tunnel, is brought about by neural systems buried deep inside the brain. Of course, an external world does exist, and knowledge and action do causally connect us to it—but the conscious experience of knowing, acting, and being connected is an exclusively internal affair.  Read more at location 389

TWO A TOUR OF THE TUNNEL 

THE ONE-WORLD PROBLEM: THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

Only people who have suffered severe psychiatric disorders or have experimented with major doses of hallucinogens can perhaps conceive of what it means to live in more than one tunnel at a time. The unity of consciousness is one of the major achievements of the brain: It is the not-so-simple phenomenological fact that all the contents of your current experience are seamlessly correlated, forming a coherent whole, the world in which you live your life. But the problem of integration has to be solved on several subglobal levels first. Imagine you are no longer able to bind the various features of a seen object—its color, surface texture, edges, and so on—into a single entity. In a disorder known as apperceptive agnosia, no coherent visual model emerges on the level of conscious experience, despite the fact that all the patient’s low-level visual processes are intact. Sufferers typically have a fully intact visual field that is consciously perceived, but they are unable to recognize what it is they are looking at.  Read more at location 433

Now imagine you are no longer able to integrate your perception of an object with the categorical knowledge that would allow you to identify it, and you consequently cannot subjectively experience what it is you are perceiving—as in asterognosia (the inability to recognize objects by touch, typically associated with lesions in two regions of the primary somatosensory cortex) or autotopagnosia (the inability to identify and name one’s own body parts, also associated with cortical lesions). There are also patients suffering from what has been called disjunctive agnosia, who cannot integrate seeing and hearing—whose conscious life seems to be taking place in a movie with the wrong soundtrack.  Read more at location 444

A number of new ideas and hypotheses in the neurosciences suggest how this “world-binding” function works. One such is the dynamical core hypothesis,5 which posits that a highly integrated and internally differentiated neurodynamic pattern emerges from the constant background chatter of millions of neurons incessantly firing away. 

...The global NCC has many different levels of description: Dynamically, we can describe it as a coherent island, made of densely coupled relations of cause and effect, emerging from the waters of a much less coherent flow of neural activity. Or we could adopt a neurocomputational perspective and look at the global NCC as something that results from information-processing in the brain and hence functions as a carrier of information. At this point, it becomes something more abstract, which we might envision as an information cloud hovering above a neurobiological substrate. The “border” of this information cloud is functional, not physical; the cloud is physically realized by widely distributed firing neurons in your head. Just like a real cloud, which is made of tiny water droplets suspended in the air, the neuronal activation pattern underlying the totality of your conscious experience is made of millions of tiny electrical discharges and chemical transitions at the synapses. In strict terms, it has no fixed location in the brain, though it is coherent. But why is it coherent? What holds all the droplets—all the micro-events—together? We do not yet know, but there are some indications that the unified whole appears by virtue of the temporal fine-structure characterizing the conscious brain’s activity—that is, the rhythmic dance of neuronal discharges and synchronous oscillations. This is why the border of this whole is a functional border, outlining the island of consciousness in an ocean made up of a myriad of less integrated and less densely coupled neural micro-events. Whatever information is within this cloud of firing neurons is conscious information. Whatever is within the cloud’s boundary (the “dynamical core”) is part of our inner world; whatever is outside of it is not part of our subjective reality. Conscious experience can thus be seen as a special global property of the overall neural dynamics of your brain, a special form of information-processing based on a globally integrated data format.  Read more at location 460

Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events. As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you. This emergence can happen during “offline states” as well: In dreams, however, the binding of contents does not work quite as well, which is why your dream reality is frequently so bizarre, why you have difficulty focusing your attention, why scenes follow each other so quickly. Nevertheless, there is still an overall situation, you are still present, and that is why phenomenal experience continues. But when you move into deep sleep and the island dissolves back into the sea, your world disappears as well. We humans have known this since Greek antiquity: Sleep is the little brother of death; it means letting go of the world.7  Read more at location 487

Each time your eyes land on a scene (remember, your eye makes about three saccades per second), there is a feedforward-feedback cycle about the current image, and that cycle gives you the detailed conscious percept of that scene. You continuously make conscious snapshots of the world via these feedforward-feedback cycles. In a more general sense, the principle is that the almost continuous feedback-loops from higher to lower areas create an ongoing cycle, a circular nested flow of information, in which what happened a few milliseconds ago is dynamically mapped back to what is coming in right now. In this way, the immediate past continuously creates a context for the present—it filters what can be experienced right now.  Read more at location 505

It has long been known that in deep meditation the experience of unity and holistic integration is particularly salient. Thus, if we want to know what consciousness is, why not consult those people who cultivate it in its purest form? Or even better, why not use our modern neuroimaging techniques to look directly into their brains while they maximize the unity and holism of their minds? Antoine Lutz and his colleagues at the W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin studied Tibetan monks who had experienced at least ten thousand hours of meditation. They found that meditators self-induce sustained high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and global phase-synchrony, visible in EEG recordings made while they are meditating.9 The high-amplitude gamma activity found in some of these meditators seems to be the strongest reported in the scientific literature. Why is this interesting? As Wolf Singer and his coworkers have shown, gamma-band oscillations, caused by groups of neurons firing away in synchrony about forty times per second, are one of our best current candidates for creating unity and wholeness (although their specific role in this respect is still very much debated). For example, on the level of conscious object-perception, these synchronous oscillations often seem to be what makes an object’s various features—the edges, color, and surface texture of, say, an apple—cohere as a single unified percept. Many experiments have shown that synchronous firing may be exactly what differentiates an assembly of neurons that gains access to consciousness from one that also fires away but in an uncoordinated manner and thus does not.  Read more at location 517

****  Could deep meditation be the process, perhaps the only process, in which human beings can sometimes turn the global background into the gestalt, the dominating feature of consciousness itself? This assumption would fit in nicely with an intuition held by many, among others Antoine Lutz, namely that the fundamental subject/object structure of experience can be transcended in states of this kind. Interestingly, this high-amplitude oscillatory activity in the brains of experienced meditators emerges over several dozens of seconds. They can’t just switch it on; instead, it begins to unfold only when the meditator manages effortlessly to “step out of the way.” The full-blown meditative state emerges only slowly, but this is exactly what the theory predicts: As a gigantic network phenomenon, the level of neural synchronization underlying the unity of consciousness will require more time to develop, because the amount of time required to achieve synchronization is proportional to the size of the neural assembly—in meditation, an orchestrated group of many hundreds of million nerve cells must be formed. The oscillations also correlate with the meditators’ verbal reports of the intensity of the meditative experience—that is, oscillations are directly related to reports of intensity. Another interesting finding is that there are significant postmeditative changes to the baseline activity of the brain. Apparently, repeated meditative practice changes the deep structure of consciousness. If meditation is seen as a form of mental training, it turns out that oscillatory synchrony in the gamma range opens just the right time window that would be necessary to promote synaptic change efficiently.  Read more at location 533

THE NOW PROBLEM: A LIVED MOMENT EMERGES 

A complete scientific description of the physical universe would not contain the information as to what time is “now.” Indeed, such a description would be free of what philosophers call “indexical terms.” There would be no pointers or little red arrows to tell you “You are here!” or “Right now!” In real life, this is the job of the conscious brain: It constantly tells the organism harboring it what place is here and what time is now. This experiential Now is the second big problem for a modern theory of consciousness.10 The biological consciousness tunnel is not a tunnel only in the simple sense of being an internal model of reality in your brain. It is also a time tunnel—or, more precisely, a tunnel of presence. Here we encounter a subtler form of inwardness—namely, an inwardness in the temporal domain, subjectively experienced.  Read more at location 555

The empirical story will have to deal with short-term memory and working memory, with recurrent loops in neural networks, and with the binding of single events into larger temporal gestalts (often simply called the psychological moment). The truly vexing aspect of the Now Problem is conceptual: It is very hard to say what exactly the puzzle consists of. At this point, philosophers and scientists alike typically quote a passage from the fourteenth chapter of the eleventh book of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Here the Bishop of Hippo famously notes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” The primary difficulty with the Now Problem is not the neuroscience but how to state it properly.  Read more at location 562

****  Consciousness is inwardness in time. It makes the world present for you by creating a new space in your mind—the space of temporal internality. Everything is in the Now. Whatever you experience, you experience it as happening at this moment.  Read more at location 567

In order to create a common platform—a blackboard on which messages to our various specialized brain areas can be posted—we need a common frame of reference, and this frame of reference is a temporal one. Although, strictly speaking, no such thing as Now exists in the outside world, it proved adaptive to organize the inner model of the world around such a Now—creating a common temporal frame of reference for all the mechanisms in the brain so that they can access the same information at the same time. A certain point in time had to be represented in a privileged manner in order to be flagged as reality. The past is outside-time, as is the future. But there is also inside-time, this time, the Now, the moment you’re currently living. All your conscious thoughts and feelings take place in this lived moment. How are we going to find this special form of inwardness in the biological brain? Of course, conscious time experience has other elements. We experience simultaneity. (And have you ever noticed that you cannot will two different actions at the same moment or simultaneously make two decisions?) We experience succession: of the notes in a piece of music, of two thoughts drifting by in our minds, one after the other. We experience duration: A musical tone or an emotion may stay constant over time. From all this emerges what the neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel, one of the pioneer researchers in this field, and his colleague Eva Ruhnau, director of the University of Munich’s Human Science Center, describe as a temporal gestalt  Read more at location 583

By the way, there is an upper limit to what you can consciously experience as taking place in a single moment: It is almost impossible to experience a musical motif, a rhythmic piece of poetry, or a complex thought that lasts for more than three seconds as a unified temporal gestalt.  Read more at location 596

****  Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness. And, of course, it is an illusion. As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past. At this point, it becomes clear why philosophers speak about “phenomenal” consciousness or “phenomenal” experience. A phenomenon is an appearance. The phenomenal Now is the appearance of a Now. Nature optimized our time experience over the last couple of millions of years so that we experience something as taking place now because this arrangement is functionally adequate in organizing our behavioral space. But from a more rigorous, philosophical point of view, the temporal inwardness of the conscious Now is an illusion. There is no immediate contact with reality. This point gives us a second fundamental insight into the tunnel-like nature of consciousness: The sense of presence is an internal phenomenon, created by the human brain. Not only are there no colors out there, but there is also no present moment. Physical time flows continuously.  Read more at location 614

The lived Now has a fascinating double aspect. From an epistemological point of view, it is an illusion (the present is an appearance). The moving window of the conscious Now, though, has proved functionally advantageous for creatures like us: It successfully bundles perception, cognition, and conscious will in a way that selects just the right parameters of interaction with the physical world, in environments like those in which our ancestors fought for survival. In this sense, it is a form of knowledge: functional, nonconceptual knowledge about what will work with this kind of body and these kinds of eyes, ears, and limbs. What we experience as the present moment embodies implicit knowledge about how we can integrate our sensory perceptions with our motor behavior in a fluid and adaptive manner. However, this type of knowledge applies only to the kind of environment we found on the surface of this planet. Other conscious beings, in other parts of the universe, might have evolved completely different forms of time experience.  Read more at location 632

(Note: subjectivity as field, God)  At this point, we also touch on a deeper and more general principle running through modern research on consciousness. The more aspects of subjective experience we can explain in a hardheaded, materialistic manner, the more our view of what the self-organizing physical universe itself is will change. Very obviously, and in a strictly no-nonsense, non-metaphorical, and nonmysterious way, the physical universe itself possesses an intrinsic potential for the emergence of subjectivity. Crude versions of objectivism are false, and reality is much richer than we thought.  Read more at location 654

THE REALITY PROBLEM: HOW YOU WERE BORN AS A NAIVE REALIST 

The pivotal question is how to get from a world-model and a Now-model to exactly what you have as you are reading this: the presence of a world. The answer lies in the transparency of phenomenal representations. Recall that a representation is transparent if the system using it cannot recognize it as a representation. 

...The brain creates what are called higher-order representations. If you attend to your perception of a visual object (such as this book), then there is at least one second-order process (i.e., attentional processing) taking a first-order process—in this case, visual perception—as its object. If the first-order process—the process creating the seen object, the book in your hands—integrates its information in a smaller time-window than the second-order process (namely, the attention you’re directing at this new inner model), then the integration process on the first-order level will itself become transparent, in the sense that you cannot consciously experience it. By necessity, you are now blind to the fundamental construction process. Transparency is not so much a question of the speed of information-processing as of the speed of different types of processing (such as attention and visual perception) relative to each other. Just as swiftly and effortlessly, the book-model is bound with other models, such as the models of your hands and of the desk, and seamlessly integrated into your overall conscious space of experience. Because it has been optimized over millions of years, this mechanism is so fast and so reliable that you never notice its existence. It makes your brain invisible to itself.  Read more at location 692

****  You are in contact only with its content; you never see the representation as such; therefore, you have the illusion of being directly in contact with the world. And that is how you become a naïve realist, a person who thinks she is in touch with an observer-independent reality.  Read more at location 701

Our ancestors did not need to know that a bear-representation was currently active in their brains or that they were currently attending to an internal state representing a slowly approaching wolf. Thus neither image required them to burn precious sugar. All they needed to know was “Bear over there!” or “Wolf approaching from the left!” Knowing that all of this was just a model of the world and of the Now was not necessary for survival. This additional kind of knowledge would have required the formation of what philosophers call metarepresentations, or images about other images, thoughts about thoughts. It would have required additional hardware in the brain and more fuel. Evolution sometimes produces superfluous new traits by chance, but these luxurious properties are rarely sustained over long periods of time. Thus, the answer to the question of why our conscious representations of the world are transparent—why we are constitutionally unable to recognize them as representations—and why this proved a viable, stable, strategy for survival and procreation probably is that the formation of metarepresentations would not have been cost-efficient: It would have been too expensive in terms of the additional sugar we would have had to find in our environment.  Read more at location 714

Imagine you could introspectively become aware of ever deeper and earlier phases of your information-processing while looking at the book in your hands. What would happen? The representation would no longer be transparent, but it would still remain inside the tunnel. A flood of interacting patterns would suddenly rush at you; alternative interpretations and intensely competing associations would invade your reality. You would lose yourself in the myriad of micro-events taking place in your brain at every millisecond—you would get lost inside yourself. Your mind would explode into endless loops of self-exploration. Maybe this is what Aldous Huxley meant when, in his 1954 classic, The Doors of Perception, he quoted William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”  Read more at location 744

What if you were born with an awareness of your internal processing? Obviously you would still not be in contact with reality as such, because you would still only know it under a representation. But you would also continuously represent yourself as representing. As in a dream in which you have become aware that you’re dreaming, your world would no longer be experienced as a reality but as a form of mental content. It would all be one big thought in your mind, the mind of an ideal observer. We have arrived at a minimalist concept of consciousness.  Read more at location 773

Solving the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, and the Reality Problem involves three steps: First, finding a suitable phenomenological description of what it’s like to have all these experiences; second, analyzing their contents in more detail (the representational level); and third, describing the functions bringing about these contents. Discovering the global NCC means discovering how these functions are implemented in the nervous system. This would also allow us to decide which other beings on this planet enjoy the appearance of a world; these beings will have a recognizable physical counterpart in their brains. On the most simple and fundamental level, the global NCC will be a dynamic brain state exhibiting large-scale coherence. It will be fully integrated with whatever generates the virtual window of presence, because in a sense it is this window. Finally, it will have to make earlier processing stages unavailable to high-level attention. I predict that by 2050 we will have found the GNCC, the global neural correlate of consciousness.  Read more at location 786

THE INEFFABILITY PROBLEM: WHAT WE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TALK ABOUT 

The contents of consciousness can be ineffable in many different ways. You cannot explain to a blind man the redness of a rose. If the linguistic community you live in does not have a concept for a particular feeling, you may not be able to discover it in yourself or name it so as to share it with others. A third type of ineffability is formed by all those conscious states (“conscious” because they could in principle be attended to) so fleeting you cannot form a memory trace of them: brief flickers on the fringe of your subjective awareness—perhaps a hardly detectable color change or a mild fluctuation in some emotion, or a barely noticeable glimmer in the mélange of your bodily sensations. There might even be longer episodes of conscious experience—during the dream state, say, or under anesthesia—that are systematically unavailable to memory systems in the brain and that no human being has ever reported. Maybe this is also true of the very last moments before death.  Read more at location 804

****  In between 430 and 650 nanometers, human beings can discriminate more than 150 different wavelengths, or different subjective shades, of color. But if asked to reidentify single colors with a high degree of accuracy, they can do so for fewer than 15.13 The same is true for other sensory experiences. Normal listeners can discriminate about 1,400 steps of pitch difference across the audible frequency range, but they can recognize these steps as examples of only about 80 different pitches. The University of Toronto philosopher Diana Raffman has stated the point clearly: “We are much better at discriminating perceptual values (i.e. making same/different judgments) than we are at identifying or recognizing them.”14 Technically, this means we do not possess introspective identity criteria for many of the simplest states of consciousness. Our perceptual memory is extremely limited. You can see and experience the difference between Green No. 24 and Green No. 25 if you see both at the same time, but you are unable consciously to represent the sameness of Green No. 25 over time.  Read more at location 815

even experts of introspection will never be able to exhaust the vast space of ineffable nuances. Nor can ordinary people identify a match to that beautiful shade of green they saw yesterday. That individual shade is not vague at all; it is what a scientist would call a maximally determinate value, a concrete and absolutely unambiguous content of consciousness. As a philosopher, I like these kinds of findings, because they elegantly demonstrate how subtle is the flow of conscious experience. They show that there are innumerable things in life you can fathom only by experiencing them, that there is a depth in pure perception that cannot be grasped or invaded by thought or language.  Read more at location 829

The Ineffability Problem arises for the simplest forms of sensory awareness, for the finest nuances of sight and touch, of smell and taste, and for those aspects of conscious hearing that underlie the magic and beauty of a musical experience.16 But it may also appear for empathy, for emotional and intrinsically embodied forms of communication (see chapter 6 and my conversation with Vittorio Gallese, page 174). Once again, these empirical findings are philosophically relevant, because they redirect our attention to something we’ve known all along: Many things you can express by way of music (or other art forms, like dance) are ineffable, because they can never become the content of a mental concept or be put into words. On the other hand, if this is so, sharing the ineffable aspects of our conscious lives becomes a dubious affair: We can never be sure if our communication was successful; there is no certainty about what actually it was we shared.  Read more at location 844

Remember, reduction is a relationship not between the phenomena themselves but between theories. T1 is reduced to T2. One theory—say, about our subjective, conscious experience—is reduced to another—say, about large-scale dynamics in the brain. Theories are built out of sentences and concepts. But if there are no concepts for certain objects in the domain of one theory, they cannot be mapped onto or reduced to concepts in the other. This is why it may be impossible to do what most hard scientists in consciousness research would like to do: show that Green No. 24 is identical with a state in your head.  Read more at location 857

THE EVOLUTION PROBLEM: COULDN’T ALL OF THIS HAVE HAPPENED IN THE DARK? 

There is a long history of consciousness on this planet. We have strong, converging evidence that all of Earth’s warm-blooded vertebrates (and probably certain other creatures) enjoy phenomenal experience. The basic brain features of sensory consciousness are preserved among mammals and exhibit strong homologies due to common ancestry. They may not have language and conceptual thought, but it is likely that they all have sensations and emotions. They are clearly able to suffer. But since they do all this without verbal reports, it is almost impossible to investigate this issue more deeply.  Read more at location 898

(Note: I disagree both about random chance in evolution and emergence of consciousness)  First, let’s not forget that evolution is driven by chance, does not pursue a goal, and achieved what we now consider the continuous optimization of nervous systems in a blind process of hereditary variation and selection. It is incorrect to assume that evolution had to invent consciousness—in principle it could have been a useless by-product. No necessity was involved.  Read more at location 904

Today, we have a long list of potential candidate functions of consciousness: Among them are the emergence of intrinsically motivating states, the enhancement of social coordination, a strategy for improving the internal selection and resource allocation in brains that got too complex to regulate themselves, the modification and interrogation of goal hierarchies and long-term plans, retrieval of episodes from long-term memory, construction of storable representations, flexibility and sophistication of behavioral control, mind reading and behavior prediction in social interaction, conflict resolution and troubleshooting, creating a densely integrated representation of reality as a whole, setting a context, learning in a single step, and so on.  Read more at location 909

If 100-yard sprinters were to wait until they consciously heard the starter’s shot, they would already have lost the race; fortunately, their body hears it before they do. There are many degrees of conscious experience, and the closer science looks, the more blurry the border between conscious and unconscious processing becomes. But the general notion of global availability allows us to tell a convincing story about the evolution of consciousness. Here is my part of the story: Consciousness is a new kind of organ.  Read more at location 929

The neural correlates in your brain work for you as object emulators, internally simulating the book you are holding, without your being aware of the fact. The same is true of the conscious hand-experience, which is part of the bodily subject emulator. The brain is also making other facts available to you: the fact that this book exists, that it has certain invariant surface properties, a certain weight, and so on. As soon as all this information about the existence and properties of the book becomes conscious, it is available for the guidance of attention, for further cognitive processing, for flexible behavior. Now we can begin to see what the central evolutionary function of consciousness must have been: It makes classes of facts globally available for an organism and thereby allows it to attend to them, to think about them, and to react to them in a flexible manner that automatically takes the overall context into account. Only if a world appears to you in the first place can you begin to grasp the fact that an outside reality exists. This is the necessary precondition for discovering the fact that you exist as well. Only if you have a consciousness tunnel can you realize that you are part of this reality and are present in it right now. Moreover, as soon as this global stage—the consciousness tunnel—has been stabilized, many other types of virtual organs can be generated and begin their dance in your nervous system. Consciousness is an inherently biological phenomenon, and the tunnel is what holds it all together. Within the tunnel, the choreography of your subjective life begins to unfold. You can experience conscious emotions and thereby discover that you have certain goals and needs.  Read more at location 944

Transparency solved the problem of simulating a multitude of possible inner worlds without getting lost in them; it did so by allowing biological organisms to represent explicitly that one of those worlds is an actual reality. I call this the “world-zero hypothesis.” Human beings know that some of their conscious experiences do not refer to the real world but are only representations in their minds. Now we can see how fundamental this step was, and we can recognize its functional value. Not only were we able to have conscious thoughts, but we could also experience them as thoughts, rather than hallucinating or getting lost in a fantasy. This step allowed us to become superbly intelligent. It let us compare our memories and goals and plans with our present situation, and it helped us seek mental bridges from the present to a more desirable reality.  Read more at location 1003

The discovery of the appearance/reality distinction was possible because we realized that some of the content of our conscious minds is constructed internally and because we could introspectively apprehend the construction process. The technical term here would be phenomenal opacity—the opposite of transparency. Those things in the evolution of consciousness that are old, ultrafast, and extremely reliable—such as the qualities of sensory experience—are transparent; abstract conscious thought is not. From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains. In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know that our thoughts are not given but made.  Read more at location 1016

THE WHO PROBLEM: WHAT IS THE ENTITY THAT HAS CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE? 

To form a successful theory of consciousness, we must match first-person phenomenal content to third-person brain content. We must somehow reconcile the inner perspective of the experiencing self with the outside perspective of science. And there will always be many of us who intuitively think this can never be done. Many people think consciousness is ontologically irreducible (as philosophers say), because first-person facts cannot be reduced to third-person facts. It is more likely, however, that consciousness is epistemically irreducible (as philosophers say). The idea is simple: One reality, one kind of fact, but two kinds of knowledge: first-person knowledge and third-person knowledge. Even though consciousness is a physical process, these two different forms of knowing can never be conflated. Knowing every last thing about a person’s brain states will never allow us to know what they are like for the person herself. But the concept of a first-person perspective turns out to be vague the moment we take a close look at it. What is this mysterious first person? What does the word “I” refer to?  Read more at location 1041

****  Is the existence of an experiencing self a necessary component of consciousness? I don’t think it is—for one thing, because there seem to be “self-less” forms of conscious experience. In certain severe psychiatric disorders, such as Cotard’s syndrome, patients sometimes stop using the first-person pronoun and, moreover, claim that they do not really exist. M. David Enoch and William Trethowan have described such cases in their book Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes: “Subsequently the subject may proceed to deny her very existence, even dispensing altogether with the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’. One patient even called herself ‘Madam Zero’ in order to emphasize her non-existence. One [patient] said, referring to herself, ‘It’s no use. Wrap it up and throw “it” in the dustbin’.”18 Mystics of all cultures and all times have reported deep spiritual experiences in which no “self ” was present, and some of them, too, stopped using the pronoun “I.” Indeed, many of the simple organisms on this planet may have a consciousness tunnel with nobody living in it. Perhaps some of them have only a consciousness “bubble” instead of a tunnel, because, together with the self, awareness of past or future disappears as well.  Read more at location 1049

Human consciousness is characterized by various forms of inwardness, all of which influence one another: First, it is an internal process in the nervous system; second, it creates the experience of being in a world; third, the virtual window of presence gives us temporal internality, a Now. But the deepest form of inwardness was the creation of an internal self/world border. In evolution, this process started physically, with the development of cell membranes and an immune system to define which cells in one’s body were to be treated as one’s own and which were intruders.19 Billions of years later, nervous systems were able to represent this self/world distinction on a higher level—for instance, as body boundaries delineated by an integrated but as yet unconscious body schema. Conscious experience then elevated this fundamental strategy of partitioning reality to a previously unknown level of complexity and intelligence. The phenomenal self was born, and the conscious experience of being someone gradually emerged. A self-model, an inner image of the organism as a whole, was built into the world-model, and this is how the consciously experienced first-person perspective developed. How to comprehend subjectivity is the deepest puzzle in consciousness research.  Read more at location 1060

CHAPTER TWO APPENDIX

THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A CONVERSATION WITH WOLF SINGER 

Wolf Singer is professor of neurophysiology and director of the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2004, he founded the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), which conducts basic theoretical research in various areas of science, bringing together theorists from the disciplines of biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics, and computer science.  Read more at location 1073

A unique property of consciousness is its coherence. The contents of consciousness change continuously, at the pace of the experienced present, but at any one moment all the contents of phenomenal awareness are related to one another, unless there is a pathological condition causing a disintegration of conscious experience. This suggests a close relation between consciousness and binding. It seems that only those results of the numerous computational processes that have been bound successfully will enter consciousness simultaneously. This notion also establishes a close link among consciousness, short-term memory, and attention. Evidence indicates that stimuli need to be attended to in order to be perceived consciously, and only then will they have access to short-term memory.  Read more at location 1082

Since the discovery of synchronized oscillatory discharges in the visual cortex more than a decade ago, more and more evidence has supported the hypothesis that synchronization of oscillatory activity may be the mechanism for the binding of distributed brain processes—whereas the relevant oscillation frequencies differ for different structures and in the cerebral cortex typically cover the range of beta- and gamma-oscillations: 20 to 80 Hz. What makes the synchronization phenomena particularly interesting in the present context is that they occur in association with a number of functions relevant for conscious experience.  Read more at location 1104

In a test in which subjects are exposed to stimuli that are degraded by noise so that the stimuli are consciously perceived only half the time, you can study the brain activity selectively associated with conscious experience. Since the physical attributes of the stimuli are the same throughout, you can simply compare brain signals in cases where the subjects consciously perceive the stimuli with the signals in cases where they don’t. Investigations reveal that during conscious perception, widely distributed regions of the cerebral cortex transiently engage in precisely synchronized high-frequency oscillations. When the stimuli are not consciously perceived, the various processing regions still engage in high-frequency oscillations—indicating that some stimulus-processing is performed—but these are local processes and do not join into globally synchronized patterns. This suggests that access to consciousness requires that a sufficiently large number of processing areas—or in other words, a sufficient number of distributed computations—be bound by synchronization and that those coherent states be maintained over a sufficiently long period.  Read more at location 1113

It is commonly held that neurons convey information by modulating their discharge rate—that is, by signaling the presence of contents for which they are specialized through increases in their firing rate. However, accumulating evidence suggests that complex cognitive contents are encoded by the activity of distributed assemblies of neurons and that the information is contained in the relations between the amplitudes and in the duration of the discharges. The great challenge for future work is to extract the information encoded in these high-dimensional time series. This requires simultaneous recordings from a large number of neurons and identification of the relevant spatio-temporal patterns. It is still unclear which aspects of the large number of possible patterns the nervous system exploits to encode information, so searching for these patterns will require developing new and highly sophisticated mathematical search algorithms.  Read more at location 1139

PART TWO

IDEAS AND DISCOVERIES 

THREE

OUT OF THE BODY AND INTO THE MIND

Body Image, Out-of-Body Experiences, and the Virtual Self 

****  (Note:  represented self, rubber hand experiment)  “Owning” your body, its sensations, and its various parts is fundamental to the feeling of being someone. Your body image is surprisingly flexible. Expert skiers, for example, can extend their consciously experienced body image to the tips of their skis. Race-car drivers can expand it to include the boundaries of the car; they do not have to judge visually whether they can squeeze through a narrow opening or avoid an obstacle—they simply feel it.  Read more at location 1167

The rubber-hand illusion helps us understand the interplay among vision, touch, and proprioception, the sense of body posture and balance originating in your vestibular system. Your bodily self-model is created by a process of multisensory integration, based on a simple statistical correlation your brain has discovered. The phenomenal incorporation of the rubber hand into your self-model results from correlated tactile and visual inputs. As the brain detects the synchronicity underlying this correlation, it automatically forms a new, coherent representation. The consciously experienced sense of ownership follows. In Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen’s study, subjects were asked to close their eyes and point to their concealed left hand; they tended to point in the direction of the rubber one, with the degree of mispointing dependent on the reported duration of the illusion. In a similar experiment, conducted by K. C. Armel and V. S. Ramachandran at UCSD’s Brain and Perception Laboratory, if one of the rubber fingers was bent backward into a physiologically impossible position, subjects not only experienced their phenomenal finger as being bent but also exhibited a significant skin-conductance reaction, indicating that unconscious autonomous mechanisms, which cannot be controlled at will, were also reacting to the assumption that the rubber hand was part of the self. Only two out of one hundred and twenty subjects reported feeling actual pain, but many pulled back their real hands and widened their eyes in alarm or laughed nervously.2 

...There are a number of intriguing further facts—such as the finding that subjects will mislocate their real hand only when the rubber one is in a physiologically realistic position. This indicates that “top-down” processes, such as expectations about body shape, play an important role. For example, a principle of “body constancy” seems to be at work, keeping the number of arms at two. The rubber hand displaces the real hand rather than merely being mistaken for it. Recently, psychometric studies have shown that the feeling of having a body is made up of various subcomponents—the three most important being ownership, agency, and location—which can be dissociated.3  Read more at location 1200

“Me-ness” cannot be reduced to “here-ness,” and, more important, agency (that is, the performance of an action) and ownership are distinct, identifiable, and separable aspects of subjective experience. Gut feelings (“interoceptive body perception”) and background emotions are another important cluster anchoring the conscious self,4 but it is becoming obvious that ownership is closest to the core of our target property of selfhood. Nevertheless, the experience of being an embodied self is a holistic construct, characterized by part-whole relationships and stemming from many different sources.5  Read more at location 1205

In human beings, repeated practice can turn the tip of a tool into a part of the hand, and the tool can be used as sensitively and as skillfully as the fingers. 

...The decisive step in human evolution might well have been making a larger part of the body model globally available—that is, accessible to conscious experience. As soon as you can consciously experience a tool as integrated into your bodily self, you can also attend to this process, optimize it, form concepts about it, and control it in a more fine-grained manner—performing what today we call acts of will. Conscious self-experience clearly is a graded phenomenon; it increases in strength as an organism becomes more and more sensitive to an internal context and expands its capacities for self-control.  Read more at location 1230

Clearly, a single general mechanism underlies the rubber-hand illusion, the evolution of effortless tool use, the ability to experience bodily presence in a virtual environment, and the ability to control artificial devices with one’s brain. This mechanism is the self-model, an integrated representation of the organism as a whole in the brain. This representation is an ongoing process: It is flexible, can be constantly updated, and allows you to own parts of the world by integrating them into it. Its content is the content of the Ego.  Read more at location 1263

THE OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

As a young man, I encountered a series of disturbing experiences, of which the following is a typical instance: It is spring, 1977. I am nineteen years old. I am lying in bed, on my back, going to sleep, deeply relaxed yet still alert. The door is half open, and light seeps in. I hear my family’s voices from the hallway and the bathroom and pop music from my sister’s bedroom. Suddenly I feel as though my bed is sliding into a vertical position, with the head of the bed moving toward the ceiling. I seem to leave my physical body, rising slowly into an upright position. I can still hear the voices, the sound of people brushing their teeth, and the music, but my sight is somewhat blurred. I feel a mixture of amazement and rising panic, sensations that eventually lead to something like a faint, and I find myself back in bed, once again locked into my physical body. This brief episode was startling for its clarity, its crisp and lucid quality, and the fact that from my point of view it appeared absolutely real. Six years later, I was aware of the concept of the out-of-body experience (OBE), and when such episodes occurred, I could control at least parts of the experience and attempt to make some verifiable observations. As I briefly pointed out in the Introduction, OBEs are a well-known class of states in which one undergoes the highly realistic illusion of leaving one’s physical body, usually in the form of an etheric double, and moving outside of it. Most OBEs occur spontaneously, during sleep onset or surgical operations or following severe accidents.  Read more at location 1270

From a philosophical perspective, OBEs are interesting for a number of reasons. The phenomenology of OBEs inevitably leads to dualism and to the idea of an invisible, weightless, but spatially extended second body. I believe this may actually be the folk-phenomenological ancestor of the notion of a “soul” and of the philosophical protoconcept of the mind.12 The soul is the OBE-PSM. The traditional concept of an immortal soul that exists independently of the physical body probably has a recent neurophenomenological correlate. In its origins, the “soul” may have been not a metaphysical notion but simply a phenomenological one: the content of the phenomenal Ego activated by the human brain during out-of-body experiences.  Read more at location 1320

****  This mythical idea of a “subtle body” that is independent of the physical body and is the carrier of higher mental functions, such as attention and cognition, is found in many different cultures and at many times—for instance, in prescientific theories about a “breath of life.”13 Examples are the Hebrew ruach, the Arabic ruh, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, and the Indian prana. The subtle body is a spatially extended entity that was said to keep the physical body alive and leave it after death.14 It is also known in theosophy and in other spiritual traditions; for instance, as “the resurrection body” and “the glorified body” in Christianity, “the most sacred body” and “supracelestial body” in Sufism, “the diamond body” in Taoism and Vajrayana, “the light body” or “rainbow body” in Tibetan Buddhism. My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—says that this subtle body does indeed exist, but it is not made of “angel stuff ” or “astral matter.” It is made of pure information, flowing in the brain.15 Of course, the “flow of information” is just another metaphor, but the information-processing level of description is the best we have at this stage of research. It creates empirically testable hypotheses, and it allows us to see things we could not see before. The subtle body is the brain’s self-model, and scientific research on the OBE shows this in a particularly striking way.  Read more at location 1328

Susan J. Blackmore has hypothesized that during OBEs we move in discrete shifts, from one salient point in our cognitive map to the next. The shifts take place in an internal model of our environment—a coarse-grained internal simulation of landmarks in settings with which we are familiar. Her general idea is that the OBE is a conscious simulation of the world—spatially organized from a third-person perspective and including a realistic representation of one’s own body—and it is highly realistic because we do not recognize it as a simulation.17 Blackmore’s theory is interesting because it treats OBEs as behavioral spaces. And why shouldn’t they be internally simulated behavioral spaces? After all, conscious experience itself seems to be just that: an inner representation of a space in which perceptions are meaningfully integrated with one’s behavior. What I found most convincing about Blackmore’s OBE model were the jumps from landmark to landmark, a phenomenological feature I had overlooked in my own OBE episodes.  Read more at location 1352

Vestibulo-motor sensations are strong in the OBE state (indeed, one fruitful way of looking at OBEs is as complex vestibulo-motor hallucinations), but weight sensations are only weakly felt, and flying seems to come naturally as the logical means of OBE locomotion. Because most OBEs happen at night, another implicit assumption is that you cannot see very well. That is, if you are jumping from one landmark in your mental model of reality to the next, it is not surprising that the space between two such salient points is experientially vague or underdetermined; at least I simply didn’t expect to see much detail. Note that the absence of thermal sensations and the short blackouts between different scenes are also well documented in dream research (see chapter 5).  Read more at location 1374

This one comes from Swiss biochemist Ernst Waelti, who conducts research at the University of Bern’s Institute of Pathology on virosomes for drug delivery and gene transfer: I awoke at night—it must have been about 3 A.M.—and realized I was unable to move. I was absolutely certain I was not dreaming, as I was enjoying full consciousness. Filled with fear about my current condition, I had only one goal—namely, to be able to move my body again. I concentrated all my will power and tried to roll over onto my side: Something rolled, but not my body—something that was me, my whole consciousness, including all of its sensations. I rolled onto the floor beside the bed. While this was happening, I did not feel bodiless but as if my body consisted of a substance constituted of a mixture of gas and liquid. To this day, I have not forgotten the amazement that gripped me when I felt myself falling to the floor, but the expected hard impact never came. Had my normal body fallen like that, my head would have collided with the edge of my bedside table. Lying on the floor, I was seized by panic. I knew I possessed a body, and I had only one overwhelming desire: to be able to control it again. With a sudden jolt, I regained control of it, without knowing how I managed to get back into it. Again from Waelti, about another occasion: In a dazed state, I went to bed at 11 P.M. and tried to fall asleep. I was restless and turned over frequently, causing my wife to grumble briefly. Now I forced myself to lie in bed motionless. For a while, I dozed, then felt the need to move my hands, which were lying on the blanket, into a more comfortable position. In the same instant, I realized that . . . my body was lying there in some kind of paralysis. Simultaneously, I found I could pull my hands out of my physical hands, as if the latter were just a stiff pair of gloves. The process of detachment started at the fingertips, in a way that could be felt clearly, with a perceptible sound, a kind of crackling. This was precisely the movement I had intended to carry out with my physical hands. With this, I detached from my body and floated out of it head first, attaining an upright position, as if I were almost weightless. Nevertheless, I had a body, consisting of real limbs. You have certainly seen how elegantly a jellyfish moves through the water. I could now move around with the same ease. I lay down horizontally in the air and floated across the bed, like a swimmer who has pushed himself off the edge of a swimming pool. A delightful feeling of liberation arose within me. But soon I was seized by the ancient fear common to all living creatures—the fear of losing my physical body. It sufficed to drive me back into my body.18  Read more at location 1380

Various studies show that between 8 and 15 percent of people in the general population have had at least one OBE.20 There are much higher incidences in certain groups of people, such as students (25 percent), paranormal believers (49 percent), and schizophrenics (42 percent); there are also OBEs of neurological origin, as in epileptics.21  Read more at location 1410

Another reason the OBE is interesting from a philosophical perspective is that it is the best known state of consciousness in which two self-models are active at the same time. To be sure, only one of them is the “locus of identity,” the place where the agent (in philosophy, an entity that acts) resides. The other self-model—that of the physical body lying, say, on the bed below—is not, strictly speaking, a self-model, because it does not function as the origin of the first-person perspective. This second self-model is not a subject model. It is not the place from which you direct your attention. On the other hand, it is still your own body that you are looking at. You recognize it as your own, but now it is not the body as subject, as the locus of knowledge, agency, and conscious experience. That is exactly what the Ego is. These observations are interesting because they allow us to distinguish different functional layers in the conscious human self. Interestingly, there is a range of phenomena of autoscopy (that is, the experience of viewing your body from a distance) that are probably functionally related to OBEs, and they are of great conceptual interest. The four main types are autoscopic hallucination, heautoscopy, out-of-body experience, and the “feeling of a presence.” In autoscopic hallucinations and heautoscopy, patients see their own body outside, but they do not identify with it and don’t have the feeling that they are “in” this illusory body. However, in heautoscopy, things may sometimes go back and forth, and the patient doesn’t know which body he is in right now. The shift in the visuospatial first-person perspective, localization, and identification of the self with an illusory body at an extracorporeal position are complete in out-of-body experiences. Here the self and the visuospatial first-person perspective are localized outside one’s body, and people see their physical body from this disembodied location. The “feeling of a presence”—which has also been caused by directly stimulating the brain with an electrode—is particularly interesting: It is not a visual own-body illusion but an illusion during which a second illusory body is only felt (but not seen).23  Read more at location 1430

All these phenomena show that not only identification with and localization of body parts but also the conscious representation of the entire body and the associated sense of selfhood can be disturbed. All four types of experience are caused by multisensory disintegration having a clear-cut neurological basis (see light areas); brain tumors and epilepsy are among the most frequent causes for heautoscopy.  Read more at location 1446

It is also interesting to take a closer look at the phenomenology of OBEs. For example, the “head exit” depicted in figure 6a is found in only 12.5 percent of cases. The act of leaving your body is abrupt in 46.9 percent of cases but can also vary from slow (21.9 percent) to gradual and very slow (15.6 percent).26 Many OBEs are short, and one recent study found a duration of less than five minutes in nearly 40 percent of cases and less than half a minute in almost 10 percent. In a little more than half the cases, the subjects “see” their body from an external perspective, and 62 percent do so from a short distance only.27 Many OBEs involve only a passive sense of floating in a body image, though the sense of selfhood is robust. In a recent study more than half the subjects reported being unable to control their movements, whereas nearly a third could. Others experienced no motion at all.28 Depending on the study, 31 to 84 percent of subjects find themselves located in a second body (but this may also be an indefinite spatial volume), and about 31 percent of OBEs are actually “asomatic”—they are experienced as bodiless and include an externalized visuospatial perspective only. Vision is the dominant sensory modality in 68.8 percent, hearing in 15.5 percent. An older study found the content of the visual scene to be realistic (i.e., not supernatural) in more than 80 percent of cases.29  Read more at location 1459

I have always believed that OBEs are important for any solid, empirically grounded theory of self-consciousness. But I had given up on them long ago; there was just too little substantial research, not enough progress over decades, and most of the books on OBEs merely seemed to push metaphysical agendas and ideologies. This changed in 2002, when Olaf Blanke and his colleagues, while doing clinical work at the Laboratory of Presurgical Epilepsy Evaluation of the University Hospital of Geneva, repeatedly induced OBEs and similar experiences by electrically stimulating the brain of a patient with drug-resistant epilepsy, 

...Blanke’s first tentative hypothesis was that out-of-body experiences, at least in these cases, resulted from a failure to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information.30 In more recent studies, he and his colleagues localized the relevant brain lesion or dysfunction at the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ).31 They argue that two separate pathological conditions may have to come together to cause an OBE. The first is disintegration on the level of the self-model, brought about by a failure to bind proprioceptive, tactile, and visual information about one’s body. The second is conflict between external, visual space and the internal frame of reference created by vestibular information, i.e., our sense of balance. We all move within an internal frame of reference created by our vestibular organs. In vertigo or dizziness, for example, we have problems with vestibular information while experiencing the dominant external, visual space. If the spatial frame of reference created by our sense of balance and the one created by vision come apart, the result could well be the conscious experience of seeing one’s body in a position that does not coincide with its felt position.  Read more at location 1483

A recent study conducted by Dr. Olaf Blanke provides new scientific insight into experiences more often left to paranormal explanations. Stimulating a part of the brain called the angular gyrus on opposing sides yielded two distinct results: the feeling of a bodily presence behind oneself and an OBE.  Read more at location 1493

Recent findings show that the phenomenal experience of disembodiment depends not just on the right half of the temporo-parietal junction but also on an area in the left half, called the extrastriate body-area. A number of different brain regions may actually contribute to the experience. Indeed, the OBE may turn out not to be one single and unified target phenomenon.  Read more at location 1507

VIRTUAL OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES 

At the end of the experiment, the subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their experiences. Results showed that for the synchronous conditions in which they were observing either their own body or a mannequin, they often felt as though the virtual figure was their own body, actually identifying with and “jumping into” it. This impression was less likely to occur in the case of the wooden slab, as well as in all of the asynchronous conditions. The synchronous experiments also showed a significantly larger shift by the subjects toward the projected real or fake body than did the asynchronous control conditions. In other control conditions, subjects observed a screen without a body in it and were then displaced (visual scene), or were simply displaced only. These data suggest that locating the “self ” in the case of conflicting visual and somatosensory input is as prone to error as was reported for a body part in the rubber-hand illusion.  Read more at location 1541

****  Here is what I call the “embedding principle”: The bodily self is phenomenally represented as inhabiting a volume in space, whereas the seeing self is an extensionless point—namely, the center of projection for our visuospatial perspective, the geometrical origin of our perspectival visual model of reality. Normally this point of origin (behind the eyes, as if a little person were looking out of them as one looks out a window) is within the volume defined by the felt bodily self. Yet, as our experiments demonstrated, seeing and bodily self can be separated, and the fundamental sense of selfhood is found at the location of the visual body representation.  Read more at location 1547

THE ESSENCE OF SELFHOOD 

****  What we really want are the constitutive conditions for selfhood. We want to know what is truly necessary and what is perhaps only sufficient to bring about an Ego, the fundamental feeling of “being someone.” For example, in our quest for the core of the conscious self, it would be progress if one could differentiate between what is merely causally enabling, and what is strictly necessary under the laws of nature holding in this universe. Our experiments demonstrate that agency is not necessary, because they selectively manipulate only two dimensions: self-identification (with the content of a conscious body image) and self-localization (in a spatial frame of reference). They do so with the subject in a passive condition, without will or bodily agency. This shows how the target phenomenon—self-consciousness—can be causally controlled by multisensory conflict alone. That is important because if we combine the discovery that this can be achieved simply by creating a conflict between sight and touch with the fact that the shift in visual perspective during OBEs can also be caused by an epileptic seizure or by direct stimulation with an electrode in the brain, we get a much better idea of what the simplest form of self-consciousness might be. It must be something very local, something in the brain itself, and it is independent of motor control, of moving your body.33 We know more: A seeing self also is not necessary.  Read more at location 1555

You can be a robust, conscious self even if you are emotionally flat, if you do not engage in acts of will, and also in the absence of thought. Emotions, will, and thoughts are not necessary to the fundamental sense of selfhood. Every meditator (remember chapter 1) can confirm that you may settle into a calm, emotionally neutral state, deeply relaxed and widely alert, a state of pure observation, without any thought, while a certain elementary form of bodily self-consciousness remains. Let us call this “selfhood-as-embodiment.” So what is the essence? Location in space and time plus a transparent body image seem to be very close.  Read more at location 1566

Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible. It includes an image of the body in time and space (location) plus the fact that the organism creating this image does not recognize it as an image (identification). So we must have a Now, plus a spatial frame of reference, and a transparent body-model. Then we need a visual (or auditory) perspective originating within the body volume, a center of projection embedded in the volume of the body. But the really interesting step is the one from the minimal self to a slightly more robust first-person perspective. It is the step from selfhood-as-embodiment to selfhood-as-subjectivity. The decisive transition takes place when the system is already given to itself through minimal self-consciousness and then, in addition, represents itself as being directed toward an object. I believe this happens exactly when we first discover that we can control the focus of attention. We understand that we can draw things from the fringe of consciousness into the center of experience, holding them in the spotlight of attention or deliberately ignoring them—that we can actively control what information appears in our mind.  Read more at location 1577

Here is another lesson to be learned from the careful study of OBEs: Some OBErs act, but others have a passive experience of floating in a body image; often the second body is not even available for conscious control, yet the sense of selfhood is robust. In a recent study, 53.1 percent of subjects reported not being able to control their own movements (whereas 28.1 percent did, and others didn’t experience motion at all).34 So it clearly is the more subtle experience of controlling the focus of attention, which seems to be at the heart of inwardness—selfhood-as-subjectivity is intimately related to “modeling mental resource allocation” as some sober computational neuroscientist might say. The correct philosophical term would be “epistemic control”: The mental action of expanding your knowledge about the world, for example, by selecting what you will know, while at the same time excluding what you will, for now, ignore. What this adds is a strong first-person perspective, the experience of being directed at an object. Subjective awareness in this sense of having a perspective by being directed at the world is body image (in space and time) plus the experience of attentional control; inwardness appears when we attend to the body itself.  Read more at location 1592

WE LIVE IN A VIRTUAL WORLD 

Nature’s virtual reality is conscious experience—a real-time world-model that can be viewed as a permanently running online simulation, allowing organisms to act and interact. Millions of years ago, nature’s virtual reality achieved what today’s software engineers still strive for: the phenomenal properties of “presence” and “full immersion.”  Read more at location 1613

****  in the case of the Ego, the target system and the simulating system are identical: The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.  Read more at location 1643

The human brain can be compared to a modern flight simulator in several respects. Like a flight simulator, it constructs and continuously updates an internal model of external reality by using a continuous stream of input supplied by the sensory organs and employing past experience as a filter. It integrates sensory-input channels into a global model of reality, and it does so in real time. However, there is a difference. The global model of reality constructed by our brain is updated at such great speed and with such reliability that we generally do not experience it as a model. For us, phenomenal reality is not a simulational space constructed by our brains; in a direct and experientially untranscendable manner, it is the world we live in. Its virtuality is hidden, 

...Finally, the brain also differs from a flight simulator in that there is no user, no pilot who controls it. The brain is like a total flight simulator, a self-modeling airplane that, rather than being flown by a pilot, generates a complex internal image of itself within its own internal flight simulator. The image is transparent and thus cannot be recognized as an image by the system. Operating under the condition of a naive-realistic self-misunderstanding, the system interprets the control element in this image as a nonphysical object: The “pilot” is born into a virtual reality with no opportunity to discover this fact. The pilot is the Ego. The total flight simulator generates an Ego Tunnel but is completely lost in it. If the virtual self functions extremely well, the organism using it is completely unaware of its “as if ” nature.  Read more at location 1674

PHANTOM LIMBS 

Following amputation, many patients experience a so-called phantom limb at some point—the persistent and unmistakable impression that the lost limb is still present, still part of their body.38 These phantom limbs feel somewhat less real than the rest of the body, a bit “ghostly.”  Read more at location 1685

One interesting fact about phantom-limb experiences is that they also happen to people who were born missing certain limbs. A recent case study conducted by Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger and his colleagues of the University Hospital in Zürich used a seven-point scale to rate the subjectively perceived vividness of phantom limbs.42 Interestingly, the ratings showed highly consistent judgments across sessions for their subject, “AZ,” a forty-four-year-old university-educated woman born without forearms and legs. For as long as she could remember, she had experienced mental images of her nonexistent forearms (including fingers) and legs (including feet and the first and fifth toes). But, as the figure shows, these phantoms were not as realistic as the content of her nonhallucinatory body model. Moreover, she reported that “[a]wareness of her phantom limbs is transiently disrupted only when some object or person invades their felt position or when she sees herself in a mirror.” Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of her imagined phantom hand movements showed no activation of primary sensorimotor areas, but did show activity in the bilateral premotor and parietal cortex. Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the sensorimotor cortex consistently elicited sensations in the phantom fingers and hand, on the side opposite the stimulation. Premotor and parietal stimulation evoked similar phantom sensations, though without showing motor-evoked potentials in the stump. Brugger’s data demonstrate that body parts that never physically developed can be represented in sensory and motor areas of the cortex.  Read more at location 1746

FOUR

FROM OWNERSHIP TO AGENCY TO FREE WILL 

THE ALIEN HAND 

Patients suffering from Alien Hand syndrome still experience the hand as their own hand; the conscious sense of ownership is still there, but there is no corresponding experience of will in the patient’s mind. As philosophers say, the “volitional act” is missing, and the goal-state driving the alien hand’s behavior is not represented in the person’s conscious mind. The fact that the arm is clearly a subpersonal part of the body makes it even more striking to see how the patient automatically attributes something like intentionality and personhood to it, treating it as an autonomous agent. This conflict between the hand and the willing self can even become a conflict between the hand and the thinking self. For instance, when one patient’s left hand made a move he did not wish to make in a game of checkers, he corrected the move with his right hand. Then, to his frustration, the isolated functional module in his brain that was driving his left arm caused it to repeat the unwanted move.5  Read more at location 1809

In fact, in some psychiatric syndromes, patients experience every consciously perceived event in their environment as directly caused by themselves. In other mental diseases, such as schizophrenia, one may feel that one’s body and thoughts are remote-controlled and that the whole world is one big machine, a soulless and meaningless mechanism grinding away. Note that both types of observations illustrate my claim in chapter 1 that we must view the brain as a reality engine: It is a system that constantly makes assumptions about what exists and what doesn’t, thereby creating an inner reality including time, space, and causal relations. Psychiatric diseases are reality-models—alternate ontologies developed to cope with serious and often specific problems. Interestingly, in almost all cases these alternate ontologies can be mapped onto a philosophical ontology—that is, they will correspond to some well-established metaphysical idea about the deeper structure of reality (radical determinism, say, or the omnipotent, omnipresent God’s-eye view).  Read more at location 1822

There is a kind of agency even more subtle than the ability to experience yourself as a coherent acting self and the direct cause of change: This is what I call attentional agency. Attentional agency is the experience of being the entity that controls what Edmund Husserl described as Blickstrahl der Aufmerksamkeit—the “ray of attention.” As an attentional agent, you can initiate a shift in attention and, as it were, direct your inner flashlight at certain targets: a perceptual object, say, or a specific feeling. In many situations, people lose the property of attentional agency, and consequently their sense of self is weakened.  Read more at location 1855

In order to have Descartes’ experience of the Cogito—the robust experience of being a thinking thing, an Ego—you must also have had the experience of deliberately selecting the contents of your mind. This is what the various forms of agency have in common: Agency allows us to select things: our next thought, the next perceptual object we want to focus on, our next bodily movement. It is also the experience of executive consciousness—not only the experience of initiating change but also of carrying it through and sustaining a more complex action over time. At least this is the way we have described our inner experience for centuries. A related aspect that bodily agency, attentional agency, and cognitive agency have in common is the subjective sense of effort. Phenomenologically, it is an effort to move your body.  Read more at location 1868

****  our self-model as well as inside it. Such goal-directed movements might not even be consciously experienced at all. In a serious neurological disorder called akinetic mutism, patients do nothing but lie silently in their beds. They have a sense of ownership of their body as a whole, but although they are awake (and go through the ordinary sleep-wake cycle), they are not agents: They do not act in any way. They do not initiate any thoughts. They do not direct their attention. They do not talk or move.6 Then there are those cases in which parts of our bodies perform complex goal-directed actions without our having the conscious experience of these being our actions or our goals, without a conscious act of will having preceded them—in short, without the experience of being an agent.  Read more at location 1880

Many of our best empirical theories suggest that the special sense of self associated with agency has to do both with the conscious experience of having an intention and with the experience of motor feedback. That is, the experience of selecting a certain goal-state must be integrated with the subsequent experience of bodily movement. The self-model achieves just that. It binds the processes by which the mind creates and compares competing alternatives for action with feedback from your bodily movements. This binding turns the experience of movement into the experience of an action.  Read more at location 1888

HALLUCINATING AGENCY 

Based on these findings, Wegner and Wheatley suggest that the phenomenal experience of will, or mental causation, is governed by three principles: The principle of exclusivity holds that the subject’s thought should be the only introspectively available cause of action; the principle of consistency holds that the subjective intention should be consistent with the action; and the principle of priority holds that the thought should precede the action “in a timely manner.”10  Read more at location 1929

Patrick Haggard, of University College London, perhaps the leading researcher in the fascinating and somewhat frightening new field of research into agency and the self, has demonstrated that our conscious awareness of movement is not generated by the execution of ready-made motor commands; instead, it is shaped by preparatory processes in the premotor system of the brain. Various experiments show that our awareness of intention is closely related to the specification of which movements we want to make. 

...Haggard points out that the awareness of intention and the awareness of movement are conceptually distinct, but he speculates that they must derive from a single processing stage in the motor pathway. It looks as though our access to the ongoing motor-processing in our brains is extremely restricted; awareness is limited to a very narrow window of premotor activity, an intermediate phase of a longer process. If Haggard is right, then the sense of agency, the conscious experience of being someone who acts, results from the process of binding the awareness of intention together with the representation of one’s actual movements. This also suggests what subjective awareness of intention is good for: It can detect potential mismatches with events occurring in the world outside the brain.  Read more at location 1945

HOW FREE ARE WE? 

(

Note: I disagree with this form of strict determinism, I think predictability only emerges at larger scales (longer timelines, wider area of study))  If we were to put your twin in exactly the same situation you’re in right now, with exactly the same sensory stimuli impinging on him or her, then initially the twin could not act differently from the way you’re acting. This is a widely shared view: It is, simply, the scientific worldview. The current state of the physical universe always determines the next state of the universe, and your brain is a part of this universe.12  Read more at location 1969

When certain processing stages are elevated to the level of conscious experience and bound into the self-model active in your brain, they become available for all your mental capacities. Now you experience them as your own thoughts, decisions, or urges to act—as properties that belong to you, the person as a whole. It is also clear why these events popping up in the conscious self necessarily appear spontaneous and uncaused. They are the first link in the chain to cross the border from unconscious to conscious brain processes; you have the impression that they appeared in your mind “out of the blue,” so to speak. The unconscious precursor is invisible, but the link exists. (Recently, this has been shown for the conscious veto, as when you interrupt an intentional action at the last instant.)13 But in fact the conscious experience of intention is just a sliver of a complicated process in the brain. And since this fact does not appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains from the mental into the physical realm. This is the appearance of an agent.  Read more at location 1980

Have you ever tried to observe introspectively what happens when you decide to lift your arm and then the arm lifts? What exactly is the deep, fine-grained structure of cause and effect? Can you really observe how the mental event causes the physical event? Look closely! My prediction is that the closer you look and the more thoroughly you introspect your decision processes, the more you’ll realize that conscious intentions are evasive: The harder you look at them, the more they recede into the background.  Read more at location 1996

****  (Note:  social value of free will)  we tend to talk about free will as if we all shared a common subjective experience. This is not entirely true: Culture and tradition exert a strong influence on the way we report such experiences. The phenomenology itself may well be shaped by this, because a self-model also is the window connecting our inner lives with the social practice around us. Free will does not exist in our minds alone—it is also a social institution. The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies—rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt. These rules are mirrored in the deep structure of our PSM, and this incessant mirroring of rules, this projection of higher-order assumptions about ourselves, created complex social networks. If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not really exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing. Retribution would then appear to be a Stone Age concept, something we inherited from animals.  Read more at location 1999

From a scientific, third-person perspective, our inner experience of strong autonomy may look increasingly like what it has been all along: an appearance only.  Read more at location 2011

Here is the first of the two silliest arguments for the freedom of will: “But I know that I am free, because I experience myself as free!” Well, you also experience the world as inhabited by colored objects, and we know that out there in front of your eyes are only wavelength mixtures of various sorts. That something appears to you in conscious experience and in a certain way is not an argument for anything. The second argument goes like this: “But this would have terrible consequences! Therefore, it cannot be true.” I certainly share that worry (think of the robot society thought experiment), but the truth of a claim must be assessed independently of its psychological or political consequences. This is a point of simple logic and intellectual honesty.  Read more at location 2029

According to the purely physical background assumptions of science, nothing in the universe possesses an inherent value or is a goal in itself; physical objects and processes are all there is. That seems to be the point of the rigorous reductionist approach—and exactly what beings with self-models like ours cannot bring themselves to believe. Of course, there can be goal representations in the brains of biological organisms, but ultimately—if neuroscience is to take its own background assumptions seriously—they refer to nothing. Survival, fitness, well-being, and security as such are not values or goals in the true sense of either word; obviously, only those organisms that internally represented them as goals survived. But the tendency to speak about the “goals” of an organism or a brain makes neuroscientists overlook how strong their very own background assumptions are. We can now begin to see that even hardheaded scientists sometimes underestimate how radical a naturalistic combination of neuroscience and evolutionary theory could be: It could turn us into beings that maximized their overall fitness by beginning to hallucinate goals. I am not claiming that this is the true story, the whole story, or the final story. I am only pointing out what seems to follow from the discoveries of neuroscience and how these discoveries conflict with our conscious self-model.  Read more at location 2041

FIVE PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHONAUTICS

What Can We Learn from Lucid Dreaming? 

what we call “waking up” is something that can happen to you at any point in phenomenological time. This is a highly relevant empirical fact for philosophical epistemology. Do you recall from chapter 2 the discussion about the evolution of human consciousness and how the distinction between things that only appear to us and objective fact became an element of our lived reality? Now we can see what it means that the appearance/reality distinction emerged only on the level of appearance: False awakenings demonstrate that consciousness is never more than the appearance of a world. There is no certainty involved, not even about the state, the general category of conscious experience in which you find yourself.  Read more at location 2086

Dreams are conscious because they create the appearance of a world, but, as noted in chapter 2, they are offline states—global states of conscious experience in which the Ego is decoupled from sensory input and unable to generate overt motor behavior. The dream tunnel not only contains the appearance of a world but also (in most cases) creates a fully embodied, spatially extended self moving around in a spatially extended environment. The virtual self thus born is an exclusively internal phenomenon in an even stronger sense than that of the waking self: It is immersed in a dense mesh of causal relations, all of which are internal to the brain. Dreamers are self-aware, but functionally they are not situated . Dreams are subjective states in that there is a phenomenal self; however, the perspective from which this conscious self perceives the world is very different—and much more unstable—than it is during wakefulness.  Read more at location 2092

Blind people are sometimes able to see in dreams. Helen Keller, who turned blind and deaf at the age of nineteen months, emphasized the importance of these occasional visual experiences: “Blot out dreams, and the blind lose one of their chief comforts; for in the visions of sleep they behold their belief in the seeing mind and their expectation of light beyond the blank, narrow night justified.”3 In one study, congenitally blind subjects produced dream drawings that judges were unable to distinguish from drawings of sighted subjects, and as EEG correlates between were sufficiently similar, this strongly suggests that they can see in their dreams—but do they?4 It is also interesting to note that Keller’s dream tunnel contained the phenomenal qualities associated with smell and taste, which most of us experience only rarely in the dream state. It seems as if her dream tunnel became richer because her waking tunnel had lost some of its qualitative dimensions. The dream tunnel shows to what extent conscious experience is a virtual reality. It internally simulates a behavioral space, a space of possibilities in which you can act. It simulates real-life sense impressions.  Read more at location 2120

The most interesting feature of ordinary dreams leads to some deeper philosophical considerations about the nature of consciousness. The dream tunnel is generated in a very special configuration: During REM sleep, as noted, there is an output blockade, responsible for the paralysis of the sleeper, and there is an input blockade, which prevents (at least to a degree) sensory signals in the sleeper’s environment from penetrating conscious experience. At the same time, chaotic internal signals are generated by what are known as PGO waves. They are electrical bursts of neural activity named for the brain areas involved (the pons, the lateral geniculate nucleus in the hypothalamus, and the occipital primary visual cortex) and are closely related not only to eye movements but also to the processing of visual information.6 As the brain tries to understand and interpret this chaotic internal pattern of signals, it starts telling itself a fairy tale, with the dream ego playing the leading role. The interesting point is that the dream Ego does not know that it is dreaming. It does not realize the signals it is turning into an internal narrative are self-generated stimuli—in philosophical jargon, this feature of the dream state is a “metacognitive deficit” The dream Ego is delusional, lacking insight into the nature of the state it is itself generating.  Read more at location 2146

LUCID DREAMING 

You can have dreams in which you are not only aware of the fact that you are dreaming but also possess a complete memory both of your dream life and your waking life, as well as the phenomenal property of agency on the levels of attention, thought, and behavior. Such dreams are called lucid dreams.  Read more at location 2159

Maybe you’ve had a lucid dream yourself; the phenomenon is not rare. If not, you can try a number of different induction techniques. For instance, you can adopt the habit of performing “reality checks” several times a day. Each reality check should last at least a minute. It consists in carefully inspecting your current inner and outer environment for any indications that this might not be ordinary waking reality. 

...If you perform reality checks of this type several times a day, you have a good chance of eventually becoming a lucid dreamer. By pure habit, you will one day perform a reality check in a dream—and if you are lucky, you will correctly realize that you are dreaming.9 

....Other methods of inducing lucid dreams are even more efficient. Try setting an alarm clock early in the morning and carefully writing down the events of your last dream. Get up, move around for a short period of time, and then go back to bed. While you are falling asleep, try to rehearse the last sequence of dream events in as much detail as you can. You may find that you can consciously reenter the dream and stay lucid throughout it.10 As an intrepid philosophical psychonaut, I have of course tried to build devices to do this kind of exploring, involving headphones and tape loops whispering, “Watch out—this is a dream!” at thirty-minute intervals all night long.  Read more at location 2205

So what, exactly, is a lucid dream? In a lucid dream, the dreamer knows that she is currently experiencing a dream and is able to ascribe this property to herself. If we opt for a strong definition, another condition is that she also has access to memories of her previous dream and waking life. Autobiographical memory is fully intact. The dreamer has full access not only to past conscious experiences in waking life and in ordinary dreams but also to previously experienced lucid dreams. The overall level of mental clarity and cognitive insight is at least as high as it is during normal waking states. A further defining characteristic is that, according to subjective experience, all five senses function just as well as they do during the waking state. Finally, and perhaps most important, the property of agency is fully realized in the lucid dream. Phenomenologically, the lucid dreamer knows about her freedom of will. Not only can she direct the focus of attention wherever she likes, but she can also actually do whatever she wants—fly, walk through walls, or engage in conversations with dream figures. The subject of a lucid dream is not a passive victim lost in a sequence of bizarre episodes but rather is a full-blown agent, capable of selecting from a variety of possible actions. Full control of one’s attention is an important feature distinguishing lucid dreams from ordinary dreams. Insight into one’s freedom to act is also an important criterion of lucid dreams (but is it an insight?). During what are sometimes called pre-lucid dreams, we frequently become aware that none of this is real, that this must be a dream, but we remain passive observers. With the onset of full lucidity, the dreamer often turns from a passive observer into an agent—someone who takes charge, moves around, explores and experiments, who deliberately starts to interact with the dream world and shape it.  Read more at location 2225

Put simply, lucidity seems to occur when there is a brief and sudden increase of the general cortical level of arousal: All nerve cells become more active, the result being the sudden availability of more “computational power,” or capacity for information processing. With regard to the dream itself, lucidity seems to lead to increased vividness, heightened fear or stress, the discovery of contradictions within the dream world, and, of course, the subjective experience of becoming aware of a “dreamlike” or “unreal” quality of reality. I like these experiments because they are a rare example of trans-tunnel communication. When the lucid dreamer in the sleep lab emits eye signals by deliberately moving his or her dream-eyes up and down and scientists in the waking world read these signals off their instruments, a multiuser link between the dream tunnel and the waking tunnel is established.  Read more at location 2248

is known as eliminative phenomenalism. As the slightly overambitious PhD student explains: “Eliminative phenomenalism is the thesis that physics and the neuroscientific image of man constitute a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by a completed science of pure consciousness.” All reality, accordingly, is phenomenal reality. The only way you can drop out of this reality is by making the grandiose (but fundamentally false) assumption that there actually is an outside world and that you are the subject—that is, the experiencer—of this phenomenal reality, that there actually is a consciousness tunnel (a wormhole, as they ironically call it), and that it is your own tunnel.  Read more at location 2293

CHAPTER FIVE APPENDIX

DREAMING: A CONVERSATION WITH ALLAN HOBSON 

Allan Hobson is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he founded the Laboratory of Neurophysiology in order to study the brain basis of dreaming.  Read more at location 2315

Dream consciousness is more intense, more single-minded, more elaborate, and more bizarre than consciousness in waking. Hence, it can reasonably be viewed as the most autocreative state of the brain-mind.  Read more at location 2329

The correlation is quantitative, not qualitative. Dreamlike mental activity is also correlated with sleep onset (stage I) and with late-night sleep (stage II), but at all times of the night or day, the correlation is highest in REM. As for the actual relationship, my hypothesis is that dreaming is our subjective awareness of our brain activation in any state of sleep. Activation is highest in REM sleep. So is dreaming. I think that dreaming and REM sleep are our subjective and objective references to the same fundamental process of the brain-mind. I am a monist, through and through.  Read more at location 2333

REM sleep is generated by the brainstem, while dreaming is the subjective experience of the brainstem’s activation of the forebrain in REM sleep. The REM generation process has many chaotic features, which the forebrain tries its best to integrate into a coherent story. But the forebrain is also in a different state than it is in waking, which makes its job more difficult. The forebrain does the best it can under difficult circumstances.  Read more at location 2343

The neuropsychologist Mark Solms asked some three hundred stroke patients whether they had noticed any change in their dreaming after their strokes. Patients reported a complete cessation of dreaming if their stroke damaged either the parietal operculum or the deep frontal white matter. These claims were particularly interesting, because these same brain regions were selectively activated in PET studies of REM sleep. Another finding of interest is the report of dream cessation after prefrontal lobotomy, which Solms discovered in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s. On their face, these findings suggest that dreaming depends upon the brain’s capacity to integrate emotional and sensory data when activated offline. But of course this doesn’t answer the first question at all. Many other brain regions are likely to be equally essential to dreaming. For example, the visual system must be involved—and, indeed, Solms’s patients reported the loss of visual imagery in their dreams if their strokes affected the occipital cortex. 

...For the present, all we can say is that dreaming depends on the selective activation and deactivation of many brain regions, including those which, when damaged, lead to the failure to report dreams.  Read more at location 2368

Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi have pointed out, it is the vast thalamocortical system that must be activated to produce consciousness. In waking and in sleep, this system is activated by the brainstem, but the chemical modulation accompanying the activation is very different in the two states. The contributions of other structures, like the limbic system and the modulatory systems of the brainstem, are very significant in that they “color” consciousness as well as activate it.  Read more at location 2387

it can be safely said that the fully developed sleep-wake cycle, with alternative phases of NREM and REM sleep, is an adaptation reserved to homeothermic animals—namely, mammals and birds that regulate their body temperature. What is the adaptive link between homeothermia and sleep? Again, the answer is simple. Keeping brain temperature constant despite enormous fluctuations of environmental temperature guarantees reliable brain function in a wide variety of environmental contexts. In other words, temperature control and brain function are tightly linked, and sleep secures that link. With respect to the consciousness angle, I follow Edelman, who refers to primary consciousness—that is, perception, emotion, and memory—and secondary consciousness, which is awareness of awareness and the ability to describe it. Secondary consciousness, which depends upon language and other sophisticated abstractions, is exclusively human. Primary consciousness is widespread among mammals and could even be present in some submammalian species. Unfortunately, these assertions can never be more than intelligent guesses, because no subhuman animal can communicate its subjective experience verbally. Animal-rights activists, like right-to-life agitators, are quite right in claiming that many subhuman and immature animals are, to a limited but significant degree, conscious.  Read more at location 2394

It might well be that dreaming reveals one’s cognitive repertoires in dealing with emotion, but that is not particularly difficult to discern in waking. The stronger claim, by psychoanalysis, that dream interpretation reveals hidden links between cognition and emotion, has no scientific proof whatsoever.  Read more at location 2428

The occasional awareness that one is in fact dreaming is an extremely informative detail of modern dream science. The fact that such insight can be cultivated thickens the plot considerably. Taken together, the data suggest that the conscious state accompanying brain activation in sleep is both plastic and causal. It is plastic because self-reflective awareness occasionally does arise spontaneously, and because with practice its incidence—and its power—can be increased. It is causal because lucidity can be amplified to command scene changes in dreams and even to command awakening, the better to remember, and enjoy, occasional dream-plot control. My position about lucidity is that it is real, it is powerful, and it is informative.  Read more at location 2432

we already know, thanks to Stephen LaBerge, that sleep lucidity occurs in REM sleep, and we can predict that during lucid REM sleep dreaming, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC, which is selectively deactivated, may become reactivated so that the ponto-thalamical show of dreams comes under conscious control. I believe that this hypothesis, which is testable, contains the answer to many fundamental neurobiological and philosophical questions, such as the relationship of brain activity to consciousness and the causality of consciousness—free will. If, as I predict, the DLPFC does reactivate during lucid dreaming while the ponto-thalamocortical dream show continues, then Daniel Dennett’s despised Cartesian theater does exist. One part of the brain—the seat of the executive ego—wakes up and watches, or even directs, the dream show thrown up on the consciousness screen by the activation of the pons, thalamus, cortex, and limbic system.  Read more at location 2438

lucid dreaming has a bad name because (a) many scientists still do not believe it is real, (b) many do not trust LaBerge’s data about its occurrence in REM sleep, and (c) many will not go near the lucid-dream problem, because they fear being labeled as cranks or nuts!  Read more at location 2448

Sigmund Freud was fifty-percent right and a hundred-percent wrong! So is Mark Solms, but for different reasons. Freud was right to be interested in dreams and what dreaming could tell us about the human psyche, and especially its emotional aspects. His dream theory is now obsolete, but its errors are still being promoted by such psychoanalysts as Mark Solms. Here’s a checklist of Freudian hypotheses and the corresponding alternatives offered by modern neurobiology: 1. Instigation of Dreaming. Freud: release of unconscious wishes. Neurobiology: brain activation in sleep. 2. Characteristics of Dreaming. a. Bizarreness. Freud: disguise and censorship of unconscious wishes. Neurobiology: chaotic, bottom-up activation processes. b. Strong emotion. Freud: Can’t explain that one! Neurobiology: selective activation of limbic lobe. c. Amnesia. Freud: repression. Neurobiology: aminergic demodulation. d. Hallucinations. Freud: regression to the sensory side. Neurobiology: activation of REMs and PGO waves. e. Delusion, loss of self-reflective awareness. Freud: ego dissolution. Neurobiology: selective deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. 3. Function of Dreaming. Freud: guardian of sleep. Neurobiology: epiphenomenon, but REM sleep essential to life via enhancement of thermoregulatory and immune functions.  Read more at location 2477

SIX

THE EMPATHIC EGO 

There are kinds of self-experience that an isolated being could never have. Many layers of our self-model require social correlates; more than that, they are frequently created by some sort of social interaction. It is plausible to assume that if a child does not learn to activate the corresponding parts of his emotional Ego during a certain crucial period of his psychological development, he will not be able to have those feelings as an adult. We can enter certain regions in our phenomenal-state space only with the help of other human beings. In a more general sense, certain types of subjective experiences—interpersonal connectedness, trust, friendship, self-confidence—may be more or less available to each of us. The degree to which individuals have access to their emotional states varies.  Read more at location 2526

At the beginning of this book, we asked how a first-person perspective can emerge in the brain. The answer was that it does so through the creation of the Ego Tunnel. Now we can ask, What about the second-person perspective? Or the “we,” the first-person-plural perspective? How does the conscious brain manage to get from the “I” to the “you” and the “we”? The thoughts, goals, feelings, and needs of other living beings in our environment constitute part of our own reality; therefore, it is vital to understand how our brains were able to represent and create not just the inward perspective of the Ego Tunnel but also a world containing multiple Egos and multiple perspectives.  Read more at location 2536

The self-model theory holds that certain new layers of consciousness, unique to the self-model of Homo sapiens, made the transition from biological to cultural evolution possible. This process started on an unconscious, automatic level in our brains, and its roots reach far down into the animal kingdom. There is an evolutionary continuity to such high-level social phenomena as the unique human capacity for consciously acknowledging others as rational subjects and moral persons.  Read more at location 2542

****  What kind of self-model do you need in order to become such a moral agent? The answer could have to do with the progression from a mental representation of the first-person-singular perspective to that of the first-person plural, along with the ability to represent mentally what the benefits (or risks) of a particular action would be for the collective as a whole. You become a moral agent by taking the coherence and stability of your group into account. In this way, the evolution of morals may have had a lot to do with an organism’s ability to distance itself mentally from a representation of its individual interests and consciously and explicitly to represent principles of group selection, even if this involved self-damaging behavior. Recall that the beautiful early philosophical theories of consciousness-as-conscience rested on installing an ideal observer in your mind. I believe the human self-model was successful because it installed your social group as an ideal observer in your mind, and to a much stronger degree than was the case in any other primate brain. This created a dense causal linkage between global group-control and global self-control—a new kind of ownership, as it were.  Read more at location 2547

SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE: CANONICAL NEURONS AND MIRROR NEURONS 

It has been known since the 1980s that there is a particularly interesting class of neurons in an area called F5 in the ventral premotor region of the monkey brain. These neurons are part of the unconscious self-model; they code body movements in a highly abstract way. Giacomo Rizzolatti, a professor of human physiology at the University of Parma and a pioneer in this exciting field of research, uses the concept of a “motor vocabulary” that consists of complex inner images of actions as a whole. Words in the monkey’s motor vocabulary might be “reach,” “grasp,” “tear,” or “hold.” The interesting aspect of this discovery is that there is a specific part of the brain that describes the monkey’s—and our own—actions in a holistic manner. This description includes the goals of the actions and the temporal pattern in which the actions unfold. The actions are portrayed as relations between an agent and the target object (a piece of fruit, say) of his action.1  Read more at location 2563

One of the most fascinating features of these so-called canonical neurons is that they also respond to the visual perception of objects in our environment. Our brain does not simply register a chair, a teacup, an apple; it immediately represents the seen object as what I could do with it—as an affordance, a set of possible behaviors.  Read more at location 2574

****  As it turns out, the traditional philosophical distinction between perception and action is an artificial one. In reality, our brains employ a common coding: Everything we perceive is automatically portrayed as a factor in a possible interaction between ourselves and the world. A new medium is created, blending action and perception into a novel, unified representational format. The second fascinating discovery about canonical neurons is that you also use them for self-representation. The motor vocabulary is part of the unconscious self-model, because it describes the goal-directed movements of one’s body.  Read more at location 2578

(Note: golden rule)  In the 1990s, researchers discovered another group of neurons. Also a part of area F5, they fire not just when monkeys perform object-directed actions, such as grasping a peanut, but also when they observe others performing the same type of action. Because these neurons respond to actions performed by others, they are termed mirror neurons. They are activated when another agent is observed using objects in a purposeful way. Thus, we are matching the bodily behaviors we observe in others with our own internal motor vocabulary. This action /observation matching system helps us understand something we could never understand using our sensory organs alone—that other beings in our environment pursue goals. We use our own unconscious self-model to put ourselves in the shoes of others, as it were. We use our own “motor ideas” to understand someone else’s actions by directly mapping them onto our own inner repertoire, by automatically triggering an inner image of what our goal would be if our body also moved that way.2 The conscious experience of understanding another human being, the subjective feeling that pops up in the Ego Tunnel when we intuitively grasp what others’ goals are and what is going on in their minds, is the direct result of these unconscious processes.3  Read more at location 2583

****  (Note:  golden rule in neurons)  it appears that the system in humans is much more generalized and does not depend on concrete effector-object interactions; consequently, it can represent a much greater variety of actions than it does in monkeys. In particular, researchers have now discovered mirror-neuron systems that seem to achieve similar effects for emotions and for pain and other bodily sensations. When human test subjects are shown pictures of sad faces, for example, they subsequently tend to rate themselves as sadder than they were before—and after being shown happy faces they tend to rate themselves as happier. Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.5  Read more at location 2600

For instance, certain regions in the insular cortex are activated when subjects are exposed to a disgusting smell, and the same regions are active when we see an expression of disgust on another person’s face. A common representation of the emotional state of disgust is activated in our brains whether we experience it ourselves or observe it in another individual. Parallel observations in the amygdala have been made for fear.6 It is interesting to note that our ability to recognize a particular feeling in another human being can be weakened or switched off by blocking the relevant parts of the mirror-neuron system. It is believed, for example, that certain areas in the ventral striatum of the basal ganglia are necessary in recognizing anger; patients with damage to this area show impairment in identifying aggression signals emitted by others.  Read more at location 2606

a higher level in the bodily Ego is active regardless of whether we are being touched or just observing someone being touched. There seems to be an underlying principle uniting these new empirical discoveries: Certain layers of our self-model function as a bridge to the social domain, because they can directly map abstract inner descriptions of what is going on in ourselves onto those of what goes on in other people. Of course, intersubjectivity is not only about the body and emotions. Thinking plays a role as well. Reason-based forms of empathy appear to involve yet other parts of the brain—specifically, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.  Read more at location 2621

(Note: wow that "became conscious" just slipped in there like nothing at all)  First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious, and the phenomenal self-model was born into the Ego Tunnel, allowing us to achieve global control of our bodies in a much more selective and flexible manner. This was the step from being an embodied natural system that has and uses an internal image of itself as a whole to a system that, in addition, consciously experiences this fact.9 The next evolutionary step was what Vittorio Gallese, Rizzolatti’s colleague at Parma and one of the leading researchers in the field, has called embodied simulation,.10 In order to understand the feelings and goals of other human beings, we use our own body-model in the brain to simulate them.  Read more at location 2627

From a philosophical perspective, the discovery of mirror neurons is exciting because it gave us an idea of how motor primitives could have been used as semantic primitives: that is, how meaning could be communicated between agents. Thanks to our mirror neurons, we can consciously experience another human being’s movements as meaningful. Perhaps the evolutionary precursor of language was not animal calls but gestural communication.15 

....As Professor Rizzolatti and Dr. Maddalena Fabbri Destro from the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Parma put it: “[T]he mirror mechanism solved, at an initial stage of language evolution, two fundamental communication problems: parity and direct comprehension. Thanks to the mirror neurons, what counted for the sender of the message also counted for the receiver. No arbitrary symbols were required. The comprehension was inherent in the neural organization of the two individuals.”16 Such ideas give a new and rich meaning not only to the concepts of “grasping” and “mentally grasping the intention of another human being,” but, more important, also to the concept of grasping a concept—the essence of human thought itself.  Read more at location 2670

A number of studies have shown that hand/arm gestures and movements of the mouth are linked through a common neural substrate. For example, grasping movements influence pronunciation—and not only when they are executed but also when they are observed.  Read more at location 2680

CHAPTER SIX APPENDIX

THE SHARED MANIFOLD: A CONVERSATION WITH VITTORIO GALLE SE 

Vittorio Gallese is professor of human physiology in the Department of Neurosciences of the University of Parma, Italy. As a cognitive neuroscientist, he focuses his research interests on the relationship between the sensory-motor system and cognition in primates, both human and nonhuman, using a variety of neurophysiological and neuroimaging techniques. Among his major contributions is the discovery, with his colleagues in Parma, of mirror neurons and the elaboration of a theoretical model of the basic aspects of social cognition.  Read more at location 2698

The shared manifold can be described at three different levels: a phenomenological level, a functional level, and a subpersonal level. The phenomenological level is the one responsible for the sense of similarity—of being part of a larger social community of persons like us—that we experience anytime we encounter others. When confronting the intentional behavior of others, we experience a specific phenomenal state of intentional attunement. This phenomenal state generates the peculiar quality of familiarity with other individuals, produced by the collapse of the others’ intentions into those of the observer. This seems to be one important component of what being empathic is about. The functional level can be characterized in terms of embodied simulations of the actions we see or of the emotions and sensations whose expression we observe in others. The subpersonal level is instantiated as the activity of a series of mirroring neural circuits. The activity of these mirror neural circuits is, in turn, tightly coupled with multilevel changes within body-states. We have seen that mirror neurons instantiate a multimodal shared space for actions and intentions. Recent data show that analogous neural networks are at work to generate multimodal emotional and sensitive “we-centric” shared spaces. To put it in simpler words, every time we relate to other people, we automatically inhabit a we-centric space, within which we exploit a series of implicit certainties about the other. This implicit knowledge enables us to understand in a direct way what the other person is doing, why he or she is doing it, and how he or she feels about a specific situation.  Read more at location 2714

****  the notion of simulation has been used by the proponents of the “Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading” to characterize the pretend state adopted by the attributer in order to understand another person’s behavior. Basically, we use our mind to put ourselves into the mental shoes of other human beings. I qualify simulation as embodied in order to characterize it as a mandatory, automatic, nonconscious, prerational, nonintrospectionist process. A direct form of experiential understanding of others, intentional attunement, is achieved by the activation of shared neural systems underpinning what others do and feel and what we do and feel. This modeling mechanism is embodied simulation. Parallel to the detached sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal representations of the body-states associated with actions, emotions, and sensations are evoked in the observer, as if he or she were performing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion or sensation. Mirror-neuron systems are likely the neural correlate of this mechanism. By means of a shared neural state realized in two different physical bodies, the “objectual other” becomes another self. Defective intentional attunement, caused by a lack of embodied simulation, might explain some of the social impairments of autistic individuals.  Read more at location 2729

what makes humans different? Language certainly plays a key role. But in a sense this answer begs the question, because then we must explain why we have language and other animals do not. At present, we can only make hypotheses about the relevant neural mechanisms underpinning the mentalizing abilities of humans, which are still poorly understood from a functional point of view. One distinctive feature of our mentalizing abilities is our capacity for entertaining potentially infinite orders of intentionality: “I know that you know that I know . . .” and so on. One important difference between humans and monkeys could be the higher level of recursion attained—among other neural systems—by the mirror-neuron system for actions in our species. A similar proposal has recently been put forward in relation to the faculty of language, another human faculty characterized by recursion and generativity. Our species is capable of mastering hierarchically complex phrase-structure grammars, while nonhuman primates are confined to the use of much simpler finite-state grammars. A quantitative difference in computational power and degree of recursion could produce a qualitative leap forward in social cognition.  Read more at location 2775

instead of drawing a line between species like ours, who are fully competent in imitation, and other species, where this capacity is at best only emerging—again, we are dealing here with the anthropocentric dichotomies so appealing to many of my colleagues—we should concentrate on understanding why mimetic skills are so important for the cultural evolution of our species. And to answer this question, we must place the issue of mimesis in the larger context of our peculiar social cognition, in which the period of parental care is much longer than in all other species. There is a clear-cut relationship between the prolonged dependency of infants on their parents and the learning processes that this dependency promotes. The longer the period of infantile dependency, the greater the opportunities to develop complex emotional and cognitive strategies of communication.  Read more at location 2792

The first point I would like to make is a methodological one. I think we should definitely try to focus more strongly on the nature of the subjects of our investigations. Most of what we know about the neural aspects of social cognition—with few exceptions pertaining to the study of language—derives from brain-imaging studies carried out on Western-world psychology students! Even with present technologies, we could do a lot better than this. It is an open question whether cognitive traits and the neural mechanisms underpinning them are universal or, at least to a degree, the product of a particular social environment and cultural education. To answer this question, we need an ethno-neuroscience. Second, even within the average sample of subjects normally studied by social cognitive neuroscientists, we do not know—or at best know very little—to what extent the results correlate with specific personality traits, gender, professional expertise, and the like. In sum, we should move from the characterization of an unrealistic “average social brain” to a much more fine-grained characterization. A third issue I would like to see addressed more specifically in the near future is the role played by embodied mechanisms in semantic and syntactical aspects of language. Let me be clear about this. Even though I spent a considerable part of my scientific career investigating prelinguistic mechanisms in social cognition, I do not think you can avoid language if the ultimate goal is to understand what social cognition really is. All our folk psychology is language-based. How does this square with the embodied approach to social cognition? To me, this is a burning question. A fourth important point pertains to the phenomenological aspects of social cognition. I think we should try to design studies in which a correlation can be drawn between particular patterns of brain activation and specific qualitative subjective experiences.  Read more at location 2810

If our scientific goal is to understand what it means to be human, we need philosophy to clarify what issues are at stake, what problems need to be solved, what is epistemologically sound and what is not. Cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind deal with the same problems but use different approaches and different levels of descriptions.  Read more at location 2831

PART THREE

THE CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION 

SEVEN

ARTIFICIAL EGO MACHINES 

From this point on, let us call any system capable of generating a conscious self an Ego Machine. An Ego Machine does not have to be a living thing; it can be anything that possesses a conscious self-model. It is certainly conceivable that someday we will be able to construct artificial agents. These will be self-sustaining systems.  Read more at location 2849

In philosophers’ jargon, the conceptual distinction between natural and artificial systems is neither exhaustive nor exclusive: that is, there could be intelligent and/or conscious systems that belong in neither category. With regard to another old-fashioned distinction—software versus hardware—we already have systems using biological hardware that can be controlled by artificial (that is, man-made) software, and we have artificial hardware that runs naturally evolved software.  Read more at location 2856

Self-models can be unconscious, they can evolve, and they can be created in machines that mimic the process of biological evolution. In sum, we already have systems that are neither exclusively natural nor exclusively artificial. Let us call such systems postbiotic.  Read more at location 2886

HOW TO BUILD AN ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUS SUBJECT AND WHY WE SHOULDN’T DO IT 

Conscious systems are systems operating on globally available information with the help of a single internal model of reality. There are, in principle, no obstacles to endowing a machine with such an integrated inner image of the world and one that can be continuously updated.  Read more at location 2906

in its very essence, consciousness is the presence of a world. In order for a world to appear to it, an artificial Ego Machine needs two further functional properties. The first consists of organizing its internal information flow in a way that generates a psychological moment, an experiential Now. This mechanism will pick out individual events in the continuous flow of the physical world and depict them as contemporaneous (even if they are not), ordered, and flowing in one direction successively, like a mental string of pearls. Some of these pearls must form larger gestalts, which can be portrayed as the experiential content of a single moment, a lived Now. The second property must ensure that these internal structures cannot be recognized by the artificial conscious system as internally constructed images. They must be transparent. At this stage, a world would appear to the artificial system. The activation of a unified, coherent model of reality within an internally generated window of presence, when neither can be recognized as a model, is the appearance of a world. In sum, the appearance of a world is consciousness. But the decisive step to an Ego Machine is the next one. If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego and a naive realist about whatever its self-model says it is. The phenomenal property of selfhood will be exemplified in the artificial system, and it will appear to itself not only as being someone but also as being there. It will believe in itself.  Read more at location 2909

A system that does not appear to itself cannot suffer, because it has no sense of ownership.  Read more at location 2922

A strong version should know that it has such a perspective by becoming aware of the fact that it is directed. It should be able to develop an inner picture of its dynamical relations to other beings or objects in its environment, even as it perceives and interacts with them. If we do manage to build or evolve this type of system successfully, it will experience itself as interacting with the world—as attending to an apple in its hand, say, or as forming thoughts about the human agents with whom it is communicating. It will experience itself as directed at goal states, which it will represent in its self-model. It will portray the world as containing not just a self but a perceiving, interacting, goal-directed agent.  Read more at location 2930

wrote: “Specify the way in which you believe a man is superior to a computer and I shall build a computer which refutes your belief. Turing’s challenge should not be taken up; for any sufficiently precise specification could be used in principle to programme a computer.”6 Of course, it is not the self that uses the brain (as Karl Popper would have it)—the brain uses the self-model. But what Popper clearly saw is the dialectic of the artificial Ego Machine: Either you cannot identify what exactly about human consciousness and subjectivity cannot be implemented in an artificial system or, if you can, then it is just a matter of writing an algorithm that can be implemented in software. If you have a precise definition of conciousness and subjectivity in causal terms, you have what philosophers call a functional analysis. At this point, the mystery evaporates, and artificial Ego Machines become, in principle, technologically feasible.  Read more at location 2940

While all sorts of theoretical complications arise, we can agree not to gratuitously increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe —and creating Ego Machines would very likely do this right from the beginning. We could create suffering postbiotic Ego Machines before having understood which properties of our biological history, bodies, and brains are the roots of our own suffering. Preventing and minimizing suffering wherever possible also includes the ethics of risk-taking: I believe we should not even risk the realization of artificial phenomenal self-models.  Read more at location 2980

BLISS MACHINES: IS CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE A GOOD IN ITSELF? 

(Note:  I disagree about his conclusion. assumes necessity and desirability of goals and desires.)  Is there a case for phenomenological pessimism? The concept may be defined as the thesis that the variety of phenomenal experience generated by the human brain is not a treasure but a burden: Averaged over a lifetime, the balance between joy and suffering is weighted toward the latter in almost all of its bearers. From Buddha to Schopenhauer, there is a long philosophical tradition positing, essentially, that life is not worth living. 

...psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running. We can recognize this structure in ourselves, but we will never be able to escape it. We are this structure.  Read more at location 3033

(Note: again, presumes more value in meaning and goals oriented purpose than existential joy)  Truth may be at least as valuable as happiness. It is easy to imagine someone living a rather miserable life while at the same time making outstanding philosophical or scientific contributions. Such a person may be plagued by aches and pains, by loneliness and self-doubts, but his life certainly has value because of the contribution he makes to the growth of knowledge.  Read more at location 3049

A CONVERSATION WITH THE FIRST POSTBIOTIC PHILOSOPHER 

(Note: I am skeptical enough about empirical grounds for any kind of certainty that all sides lose imho. No being can ever establish its own existence.)  The Metzinger Test for consciousness in nonbiological systems demands that a system not only claim to possess phenomenal experience and a genuine inward perspective but also comprehend and accept the theoretical problem of subjectivity, and that it demonstrate this by participating in a discussion on artificial consciousness. It has to put forward arguments of its own and convincingly defend its own theory of consciousness.  Read more at location 3067

EIGHT

CONSCIOUSNESS TECHNOLOGIES AND THE IMAGE OF HUMANKIND 

The Ego is a tool—one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behavior and understanding the behavior of others. We each live our conscious life in our own Ego Tunnel, lacking direct contact with outside reality but possessing an inward, first-person perspective. We each have conscious self-models—integrated images of ourselves as a whole, which are firmly anchored in background emotions and physical sensations. Therefore, the world simulation constantly being created by our brains is built around a center. But we are unable to experience it as such, or our self-models as models.  Read more at location 3132

We are Ego Machines, but we do not have selves. We cannot leave the Ego Tunnel, because there is nobody who could leave. The Ego and its Tunnel are representational phenomena: They are just one of many possible ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world, and the Ego is merely a complex physical event—an activation pattern in your central nervous system. 

...The self is not a thing but a process. As long as the life process—the ongoing process of self-stabilization and self-sustainment—is reflected in a conscious Ego Tunnel, we are indeed selves. Or rather, we are “selfing” organisms: At the very moment we wake up in the morning, the physical system—that is, ourselves—starts the process of “selfing.” A new chain of conscious events begins; once again, on a higher level of complexity, the life process comes to itself. Nevertheless, as I have repeatedly emphasized, there is no little man inside the head.  Read more at location 3147

****  Strictly speaking, there is no essence within us that stays the same across time, nothing that could not in principle be divided into parts, no substantial self that could exist independently of the body. A “self ” in any stronger or metaphysically interesting sense of the word just does not seem to exist. We must face this fact: We are self-less Ego Machines. It is hard to believe this. You cannot believe it. This may also be the core of the puzzle of consciousness: We sense that its solution is radically counterintuitive. The bigger picture cannot be properly reflected in the Ego Tunnel—it would dissolve the tunnel itself. Put differently, if we wanted to experience this theory as true, we could do so only by radically transforming our state of consciousness.  Read more at location 3154

A NEW IMAGE OF HOMO SAPIENS 

The emerging image of Homo sapiens is of a species whose members once longed to have immortal souls but are slowly recognizing they are self-less Ego Machines. The biological imperative to live—indeed, live forever—was burned into our brains, into our emotional self-model, over the course of millennia. But our brand-new cognitive self-models tell us that all attempts to realize this imperative will ultimately be futile. Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential conflict, and we seem to be the first creatures on this planet to experience it consciously. Many of us, in fact, spend our lives trying to avoid experiencing it. Maybe this feature of our self-model is what makes us inherently religious: We are this process of trying to become whole again, to somehow reconcile what we know with what we feel should not be so. In this sense, the Ego is the longing for immortality. The Ego results in part from the constant attempt to sustain its own coherence and that of the organism harboring it; thereby arises the constant temptation to sacrifice intellectual honesty in favor of emotional well-being.  Read more at location 3185

The Ego evolved as an instrument in social cognition, and one of its greatest functional advantages was that it allowed us to read the minds of other animals or conspecifics—and then to deceive them. Or deceive ourselves. Since our inbuilt existential need for full emotional and physical security can never be fulfilled, we have a strong drive toward delusion and bizarre belief systems. Psychological evolution endowed us with the irresistible urge to satisfy our emotional need for stability and emotional meaningfulness by creating metaphysical worlds and invisible persons.1 Whereas spirituality might be defined as seeing what is—as letting go of the search for emotional security—religious faith can be seen as an attempt to cling to that search by redesigning the Ego Tunnel. Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning and embed it in a positive metacontext—it is the deeply human attempt to finally feel at home. It is a strategy to outsmart the hedonic treadmill. On an individual level, it seems to be one of the most successful ways to achieve a stable state—as good as or better than any drug so far discovered. Now science seems to be taking all this away from us. The emerging emptiness may be one reason for the current rise of religious fundamentalism, even in secular societies.  Read more at location 3194

THE THIRD PHASE OF THE REVOLUTION 

Now we are entering an unprecedented stage: Centuries of philosophical searching for a theory of consciousness have culminated in a rigorous empirical project that is progressing incrementally and in a sustainable manner. This process is recursive, in that it will also change the contents and the functional structure of our self-models. This fact tells us something about the physical universe in which all these events are occurring: The universe has a potential not only for the self-organization of life and the evolution of strong subjectivity but also for an even higher level of complexity. I will not go so far as to say that in us the physical universe becomes conscious of itself. Nevertheless, the emergence of coherent conscious reality-models in biological nervous systems created a new form of self-similarity within the physical universe. The world evolved world-modelers. Parts began to mirror the whole. Billions of conscious brains are like billions of eyes, with which the universe can look at itself as being present.  Read more at location 3279

ALTERED STATES 

Most of us are completely unaware of the potential and depth of our experiential space. The amount of possible neurophenomenological configurations of an individual human brain, the variety of possible tunnels, is so large that you can explore only a tiny fraction of them in your lifetime. Nevertheless, your individuality, the uniqueness of your mental life, has much to do with which trajectory through phenomenal-state space you choose. Nobody will ever live this conscious life again. Your Ego Tunnel is a unicum, one of a kind. In particular, a naturalistic, neuroscientific image of humanity suddenly makes it obvious not only that we have a huge number of phenomenal states at our disposal but also that explicit awareness of this fact and the ability to make use of it systematically could now become common to all human beings. Of course, there is an old shamanic tradition of exploring altered states of consciousness. More-or-less systematic experimental consciousness research has been conducted for millennia—by the yogi and the dervish, by the magician, the monk, and the mystic.  Read more at location 3298

we need a new branch of applied ethics—consciousness ethics. We must start thinking about what we want to do with all this new knowledge—and what a good state of consciousness is in the first place.  Read more at location 3319

NINE

A NEW KIND OF ETHICS 

We have known for centuries that deep spiritual experiences can be caused by psychoactive substances, including mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD. Electromagnetic stimulation is another route. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger, at Laurentian University in Ontario, received worldwide media attention in the late 1990s by using electromagnetic fields to stimulate the brains of his subjects in successful attempts to create supposed religious experiences—that is, the subjective impression that an invisible person was present.3 The lesson is clear: Whatever else religious experiences may be, they obviously possess a sufficient neural correlate—a correlate that can be stimulated experimentally. It is becoming increasingly clear that there are no principled limits to this process.  Read more at location 3329

One can envision a future in which people will no longer play video games or experiment with virtual reality just for entertainment; instead they will explore the universe of altered states of consciousness in a quest for meaning, using the latest neurotechnological tools. Perhaps they will have their temporal lobes tickled on street corners, or abandon their churches and synagogues and mosques in favor of new Centers for Transpersonal Hedonic Engineering and Metaphysical Tunnel Design. In principle, we can design our own Ego Tunnels by tinkering with the hardware responsible for the relevant information-processing. In order to activate a specific form of phenomenal content, we need to discover which neural subsystem in the brain carries that representational content under normal conditions. Whether the desired phenomenal content is religious awe, an ineffable sense of sacredness, the taste of cinnamon, or a special kind of sexual arousal does not really matter. So, what is your favorite region of phenospace?  Read more at location 3343

A recent informal online poll of its readers conducted by the journal Nature attempted to determine the use of cognitive enhancers among scientists.6 Fourteen hundred people from sixty countries responded, with one in five saying he or she had used such drugs for nonmedical reasons to stimulate focus, concentration, or memory. Among users, methylphenidate (Ritalin) was most popular, with 62 percent using it, whereas 44 percent used modafinil, and 15 percent used beta blockers such as propanolol. One-third purchased these drugs over the Internet. The poll not only showed large-scale use among academics but also revealed that four-fifths of respondents thought healthy adults should be allowed to use such substances if they so desired. Almost 70 percent stated they would risk mild side effects to take such drugs themselves. One respondent said, “As a professional, it is my duty to use my resources to the greatest benefit of humanity. If ‘enhancers’ can contribute to this humane service, it is my duty to do so.” It seems safe to assume that pharmacological neurotechnology for enhancement will become better, and that just averting our gaze, as we have done with the classical hallucinogens in the past, will not help head off ethical issues. The only difference is that many more people are interested in cognitive enhancement than in spiritual experience. As cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah and colleagues put it: “The question is therefore not whether we need policies to govern neurocognitive enhancement, but rather what kind of policies we need.”7  Read more at location 3362

I recommend reading PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, by the chemist Alexander Shulgin and his wife Ann, and TiHKAL: The Continuation, by Alexander Shulgin.9 (PiHKAL is short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” and TiHKAL for “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.”) In their first book, the Shulgins describe 179 hallucinogenic phenethylamines (a group that includes mescaline and the “party drug” Ecstasy), most of which Alexander Shulgin, a drug designer and former employee of Dow Chemical, invented himself. Aside from collected personal accounts of psychedelic experiences, the book includes detailed instructions for the drugs’ chemical synthesis and information about different dosages. In the second volume, Shulgin introduces fifty-five tryptamines—again, most of them unknown on the illegal drug market prior to the book’s 1997 publication. Recipes for many of these new illegal substances, as well as first-person reports about the phenomenology associated with different dosages, are available on the Internet—easily accessed by the spiritually inclined psychology student in Argentina, the alternative psychotherapist in California, or the unemployed chemist in the Ukraine. Or, of course, by organized crime. My prediction is that by 2050 the “good old days,” when we had to deal with only a dozen or so molecules dominating the illegal market, will seem like a picnic.  Read more at location 3392

Anyone interested has already had plenty of time and opportunity to experiment with the classic hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, LSD, or mescaline. We now know that these substances are not addictive or toxic and that some of them have therapeutic potential and can even induce profound spiritual experiences. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), in which he describes the mescaline experience: “Is it agreeable?” somebody asked. (During this part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.) “Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “It just is.” Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. Here we have a first example of a state of consciousness that is illegal today. Almost no one can attain the state in Huxley’s profile without breaking the law.  Read more at location 3410

A classic study in this field is Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment, involving theology students and conducted at Harvard University in 1962.10 Recently, this experiment has generated two interesting follow-up studies, this time conducted by Roland Griffiths at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hop-kins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Here, the psychoactive compound used was not mescaline but psilocybin, another naturally occurring substance used as a sacrament and in structured religious ceremonies in some cultures, possibly for millennia. If you had to assess the value of the following state of consciousness (taken from the original experiment at Harvard), how would you rate it? I was experiencing directly the metaphysical theory known as emanationism in which, beginning with the clear, unbroken infinite light of God, the light then breaks into forms and then lessens in intensity as it passes through descending degrees of reality. . . . The emanation theory and especially the elaborately worked out layers of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology and psychology had heretofore been concepts and inferences. Now they were objects of the most direct and immediate perception. I could see exactly how these theories would have come into being if their progenitors had had this experience. But beyond accounting for their origin, my experience testified for their absolute truth. Other participants described their associated feelings as those of awe, reverence, and sacredness. A careful replication of Pahnke’s classical study, published in 2006, used rigorous double-blind clinical pharmacology methods to evaluate both the acute (seven hours) and long-term (two months) mood-altering and psychological effects of psilocybin relative to an active comparison compound (methylphenidate).11 The study was conducted with thirty-six well-educated, hallucinogen-naive volunteers. All thirty-six indicated at least intermittent participation in religious or spiritual activities such as services, prayer, meditation, church choir, or educational or discussion groups, which limits the generality of this study. Based on a priori scientific criteria, twenty-two of the thirty-six volunteers had a complete mystical experience. A dozen of those volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as being the single most spiritually significant experience of his or her life, and an additional 38 percent rated it to be among the top five most spiritually significant experiences. More than two-thirds of the volunteers rated the experience with psilocybin to be either the single most meaningful experience of his or her life or among the top five most meaningful experiences.  Read more at location 3424

Even at the fourteen-month follow-up, 58 percent of volunteers rated the experience of the psilocybin session as among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives, and 67 percent rated it among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives, with 11 and 17 percent respectively indicating that it was the single most meaningful experience and the single most spiritually significant experience. Furthermore, 64 percent of the volunteers indicated that the psilocybin experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction either moderately or very much, and 61 percent reported that the experience was associated with positive behavior change.12 This study exemplifies what I mean by saying that “we have not done our homework yet.” In the past, we have not arrived at a convincing assessment of the intrinsic value of such (and many other) artificially induced states of consciousness, of the risks and benefits they carry not only for the individual citizen but for society as a whole.  Read more at location 3446

In our ultrafast, ever more competitive and ruthless modern societies, very few people are seeking deeper spiritual experience. They want alertness, concentration, emotional stability, and charisma—everything that leads to professional success and eases stress associated with life in the fast lane. There are few Aldous Huxleys left, but there is a new demographic factor: In the rich societies, people are growing older than ever before—and they want not just quantity but quality of life. Big Pharma knows all of this. Everybody has heard about modafinil, and perhaps also that it is already in use in the Iraq War, but there are at least forty new molecules in the pipeline. Yes, there is a lot of hype, and alarmism certainly is not the right attitude. But the technology is not going away, and it is becoming better. Large pharmaceutical companies, circumventing the border between legal and illegal substances, are quietly developing numerous new compounds; they know that cognitive enhancers will reap them hefty future profits from “nonmedical use.” For instance, Cephalon, maker of modafinil,  Read more at location 3492

Is it acceptable that anyone who seeks valid spiritual or religious experience—or simply wants to see for himself or herself—has to break laws and take the risks associated with uncertain dosages, chemical impurities, and dangerous settings? Many aspects of our current drug policy are arbitrary and ethically untenable. Is it ethical, for instance, to permit advertising for dangerous addictive substances such as alcohol and nicotine? Should governments, through the taxes on such substances, profit from the self-destructive behavior of their citizens? We will need precise laws covering every single molecule and its corresponding neurophenomenological profile.  Read more at location 3511

A core problem for neuroethics in the near future will be protecting the individual’s right to privacy. Is our mental inner world, the contents of our Ego Tunnel, untouchable, an area to which the state should have no access?  Read more at location 3549

WHAT IS A GOOD STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS? 

we find ourselves caught in the midst of a dense mesh of technical systems of representation and information-processing: With the advent of radio, television, and the Internet, the Ego Tunnel became embedded in a global data cloud characterized by rapid growth, increasing speed, and an autonomous dynamic of its own. It dictates the pace of our lives. It enlarges our social environment in an unprecedented manner. It has begun to reconfigure our brains, which are desperately trying to adapt to this new jungle—the information jungle, an ecological niche unlike any we have ever inhabited.  Read more at location 3568

For those of us intensively working with it, the Internet has already become a part of our self-model. We use it for external memory storage, as a cognitive prosthesis, and for emotional autoregulation. We think with the help of the Internet, and it assists us in determining our desires and goals. We are learning to multitask, our attention span is becoming shorter, and many of our social relationships are taking on a strangely disembodied character.  Read more at location 3578

****  The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life.  ...Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the vast and confusing media jungle. 

...We can see the probable result in the epidemic of attention-deficit disorder in children and young adults, in midlife burnout, in rising levels of anxiety in large parts of the population. If I am right that consciousness is the space of attentional agency, and if (as discussed in chapter 4) it is also true that the experience of controlling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal selfhood, then we are currently witnessing not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but a mild form of depersonalization.  Read more at location 3596

My proposal for countering this attack on our reserves of attention is to introduce classes in meditation in our high schools. The young should be made aware of the limited nature of their capacity for attention, and they need to learn techniques to enhance their mindfulness and maximize their ability to sustain it—techniques that will be of help in the battle against the commercial robbers of our attention  Read more at location 3601

Education is not only about academic achievement. Recall that one positive aspect of the new image of Homo sapiens is its recognition of the vastness of our phenomenal-state space. Why not teach our children to make use of this vastness in a better way than their parents did—a way that guarantees and stabilizes their mental health, enriches their subjective lives, and grants them new insights? For instance, the sorts of happiness associated with intense experiences of nature or with bodily exercise and physical exertion are generally regarded as positive states of consciousness, as is the more subtle inner perception of ethical coherence.  Read more at location 3609

Every child has a right to be provided with a “neurophenomenological toolbox” in school; at minimum this should include two meditation techniques, one silent and one in motion; two standard techniques for deep relaxation, such as autogenic training and progressive muscle relaxation; two techniques for improving dream recall and inducing lucidity; and perhaps a course in what one might call “media hygiene.” If new possibilities for manipulation threaten our children’s mental health, we must equip them with efficient instruments to defend themselves against new dangers, increasing their autonomy.  Read more at location 3616

RIDING THE TIGER: A NEW CULTURAL CONTEXT 

Could rigorous, reductionist cognitive neuroscience develop a form of turbo-meditation, helping monks to be better monks and mystics to be better mystics? Does deep meditation perhaps also have an influence on thinking for yourself, taking your life into your own hands, and becoming a politically mature citizen?  Read more at location 3665

Many fear that through the naturalistic turn in the image of mind, we will lose our dignity. “Dignity” is a term that is notoriously hard to define—and usually it appears exactly when its proponents have run out of arguments. However, there is one clear sense, which has to do with respecting oneself and others—namely the unconditional will to self-knowledge, veracity, and facing the facts.  Read more at location 3671

We must not lose our self-respect, but we must also stay realistic and not indulge in utopian illusions; the chances for successfully riding the tiger, at least on a large scale, are not very high. But if we manage, then a new consciousness culture could fill the vacuum that emerges as the Consciousness Revolution unfolds at increasing speed. There are practical challenges and there are theoretical challenges. The greatest practical challenge lies in implementing the results of ensuing ethical debates. The greatest theoretical challenge may consist in the questions of whether and how, given our new situ