Thomas K. Metzinger

Metzinger is an analytical philosopher. advocated bringing empirical insights into philosophy, e.g. from neuroscience.

Germany having to reckon with the legacy of the holocaust. how they teach it in schools. whether people alive at the time knew what was going on and whether they like to admit it. the German government taking a publicly apologetic stance for their wrongdoings, unlike Japan's current government. the US helped to bring democracy to Germany through the Marshall plan, and now Germany is one of the most stable democracies in the world while the US is on the brink.

Metzinger criticizes Chalmers' conception of the hard problem. Harris: the hard problem is more a statement of epistemology than ontology. not that there is no mechanistic basis for consciousness, but that any explanation we have of it will at bottom still seem like a miracle. is this just a question of the limits of our intuition?

illusion (distortion of real sensory experience) vs hallucination (unrelated to sensory experience).

Metzinger believes one can see through the cognitive self but that the self runs deeper than that and cannot be unrooted. if you say "I experienced no self" there is a logical contradiction—if "you" weren't there, how could you have an autobiographical recollection of it?

Metzinger has this book Being No One where he talks about the self. says it's unreadable, but Harris says it's great for any student of philosophy.

lots of philosophers confuse consciousness and self-consciousness. philosophers of consciousness who don't explore consciousness directly (e.g. via psychedelics) are just "academic entrepreneurs".

what is the most rudimentary form of selfhood? is it the directing of attention towards objects?

combining philosophical exploration of consciousness with empirical studies, e.g. dream studies and mind-wandering studies

how is it that we become identified with any object of awareness, e.g. our thoughts?

the idea that we just perceive affordances rather than actual objects in reality. thoughts as internal affordances. as proto-selves. as a long line of children that are asking for your attention.

mind-wandering research is showing how discontinuous the sense of selfhood is. the majority of your conscious life is disconnected from selfhood? self-representational blink. analogous to a visual saccade. what is that which is aware of the gap between two thoughts?

this is such a blindspot in western science and culture!! William James expressed interest in paying attention to flows of conscious states but the predominant approach became one of understanding consciousness via behavior and the brain. we have to import these ideas from the east. perhaps not an accident that science as we know it was born in the west.

there have been many things embedded in humans' self-model from natural selection which are harmful for well-being, e.g. greed and self-esteem.

we have a lot to learn from eastern contemplative traditions, but in some way these countries are not doing so well (e.g. hospitals, freedom of speech, democratic culture). in the west, we have science and technology, but we are burning out from attention deficit disorders. is there a way we can bring these together? creating a culture that combines the totality of human wisdom? rationality, third-person empiricism, clear first-person awareness, an ethical view that defines what it means to live a good life, political and economic and cultural systems that incentivize these aims. such a culture would have to transcend geographical boundaries.

we have a bottleneck to get through in the next few centuries. lots of difficulties in both the outer world and inner world. most humans are deeply anchored in systems of mortality denial. even some meditative practices are systems of mortality denial.

philosophers who are so smart and intellectually honest and rational, but are psychologically crippled human beings, eaten alive by their own ambition, not able to feel their own body. but on the other hand we meet these monks and nuns, who are very open to ideas from western science and philosophy, but if you contradict their religious views they shut it down. many Buddhists in the west who pose as secular Buddhists; but Metzinger speculates that for many long-term practitioners, there is some delusional element. some irrational belief system; they are not truly liberated from tradition.

existence bias. is this the core of selfhood? all biological systems have a deeply-ingrained craving for existence. idea: we continually make a prediction that we will exist in 100ms, in 5 minutes, etc and through the process of embodied active inference, we seek to make that hypothesis true.

with death, we fear the lights going out, but we don't fear sleep. is sleep a temporary cancellation of subjective experience?