The Ego tunnel (A Virtual reality theory) – Metzinger
Prof. Dr. Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher of mind and consciousness. He is a professor of Theoretical Philosophy and president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. His goal is to gather insight on what subjectivity, having a self, is. In 2003 he wrote a book named "Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity" and in 2009 he followed this up with "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self". In his books he forms a theory of consciousness, and more specifically a virtual reality theory.
In the self-model theory of subjectivity, Metzinger explains that the self does not exist. According to his views, the self is not a thing but a process. This process gives you the conscious experience of being someone.
The self-model is a an active data structure that constructs the inner image of the self as a whole. Metzinger distinguishes two segments of the model: the phenomenal self-model (PSM) and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR).
The PSM is component of the self-model that is characterised by the phenomenal idea of ownership. It is highly context sensitive and flexible and it can be manipulated. What is embedded in your self-model is experiences as your own. He explains this phenomenon with the rubber hand illusion. In this illusion a person can feel ownership over a rubber hand, when the rubber hand is stroked simultaneously with the (invisible) real hand. A correlation is offered to the brain, and conscious experience follows.
The PMIR is defined as "a conscious mental model, and its content is an ongoing, episodic subject-object relation”(Metzinger, 2004). It's content is expressed in phenomenological descriptions like: "I am someone who understands the content of this sentence" or "I am someone who now gets up and gets some juice".
Having a self-model is important to control the body and your actions. But is there a global sense of self? To understand more about this, Metzinger designed an experiment with some of his colleagues, in which a subject was standing in a room, looking at the back of an avatar of himself. The experimenter stroked the back of the subject, while this action was observable in the virual reality of the avatar. According to Metzinger subjects "jumped" into the avatar. They started to identify with the avatar that they were looking at. When the subject was later asked to identify the location at which he was standing, Metzinger found subjects to have chosen a location somewhere in between the actual location and the location of the avatar, which suggests that there is also an effect on the unconscious level.
Another part of the theory is the transparency metaphor. Transparency is a property of conscious representation. You are not aware of the consciousness itself, and you do not have access to the construction of consciousness. It is the window through which we see a bird: you live with it and through it, but you are unaware of it. You can only see what it represents. Transparency creates the idea that you are directly in contact with the content of the model that is active in your brain. Metzinger thus says that even though we think we are in direct contact with the world, in reality we are only in contact with the representation of the reality in our brain. Conscious experience is an invisible interface.
According to Metzinger, the combination of the Self-model and Transparency creates the phenomenology of Identification.
Consciousness as the feeling of what happens – Damasio
Damasio is a portugese neuroscientist that spent most of his scientific career in America. In 1999 he published his book named "The Feeling of What Happens" in which he proposes a theory about consciousness. According to Daemasio, consciousness, "from its basic levels to its most complex, is the unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self” (Damasio, 1999). The theory consists of three parts that build on top of each other.
The first one is called the protoself, which is the simplest representation of self. It is not the same as a homunculus, but it it is a collection of patterns and maps of activities in the brain in which external and internal stimuli are being integrated. The process, which we share with all animals, is unconscious and serves to detect changes in homeostasis of the organism (Parvizi & Damasio, 2001).
The core consciousness is the type of consciousness that relates the protoself to objects in the world. It does not need a working memory, is not exclusive to humans, and is stable across our lifetime. It creates sense of self, by building on the information received from the protoself and establishing a relationship between the subject and the object by creating images to represent the experience of qualia. Damasio explains that emotions are unconscious reactions to a stimulus. According to his views, feelings are quite distinct from emotions. Feelings can occur without emotions, they are states of the body (for example, thirst, being hot or cold, comfort or discomfort etc). When you have an emotion, your body adopts a certain state. When you experience that state of the body (feeling), which includes the state of the emotion, this is when you experience the emotion. The emotion activates neural patterns in the brain that develop into mental images. These mental images become conscious. This "feeling of knowing a feeling" is what core consciousness is according to Damasio.
The last layer, which is called extended consciousness (later called “ the autobiographical self”), relates to time. It is the consciousness of the self across the lived past and anticipated future. The extended consciousness builds on top of the Protoself and the core consciousness and cannot exist without them. It is like an autobiographical book written about the subject's life, developing over time. It has given rise to important features like the extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language.
Damasio is very interested in how the brain creates this consciousness. He says there are three mechanisms towards creating the consciousness. There are neural patterns that create the images of the organism (the self), neural patterns that create the images of the object, and neural patterns that create the images of their relationship. According to his views, the location of the Protoself stems from multiple brain areas, for example the hypothalamus (related to homeostasis of an organism), the brain stem (mapping) and the insular cortex (emotion). Through these areas the body's responses to environmental changes are gathered. The proposed locations of core consciousness is derived from evience of people with specific areas of brain damage. Candidates of core consciousness are the cingulate gyrus, thalamic nuclei, and superior colliculi (Bosse, Jonker & Treur, 2008). The extended consciousness relies heavily on the working memory.
In a series of PET experiments Demasio et al. (2000) tested the hypothesis that feeling emotions requires activation of brain regions that are also associated with the regulation of internal organism states. They wanted to show the close relationship between the emotion and homeostasis. It turned out that the areas associated with homeostasis were indeed involved when subjects felt different types of emotions. According to Damasio and his team this shows “a strong link between emotion and mapping of the ongoing state of the organism”. Furthermore, they believe the findings show that the subjective processes of feeling emotions is (at least partly) associated with dynamic neural processing that represent some of the aspects of the organism’s homeostasis and dynamic internal state.
Analysis
General differences and similarities: Metzinger and Damasio's theories take very different approaches towards the explanation of consciousness. Both have internalist views: they think that consciousness arises from processes inside the brain. Metzinger’s virtual reality theory takes on a philosophical approach. He tries to back up his theory by behavioural experiments that he has done in collaboration with neuroscientists, which makes the theory somewhat more empirical than most of the other philosophical theories on consciousness. However, he does not get into detail about how the processes exactly work in the brain. In Damasio’s more empirical approach, attempts to define the processes and locations of consciousness by experimentation are the leading course.
What is consciousness? The core question that needs to be explained when providing a theory of the workings of consciousness is the question of what consciousness exactly is. Damasio explains that consciousness is what we lose when we fall asleep or when we use anaesthetics. But what is that what we lose? In Damasio’s views consciousness as a flow of mental images. These images contain of the sensory patterns that you have from yourself in relation to sensory information from objects around you.
When we relate this to Metzinger’s virtual reality theory, we also see the focus on images created in the brain. Metzinger says that our conscious experience is an inner space, something that is local in our brain. What we see is not what is the outside world. In stead of seeing colour, what is in front of our eyes are a mixture of wavelengths. What we see is an interpretation of the outside world. “Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our "reality tunnel.” (Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self). This shows that Damasio and Metzinger think about consciousness in a similar way. It is the interpretation of the world instead of the actual inside world what we consciously perceive.
The self: In his book Damasio describes the self in the following manner: “What gives the brain a natural means to generate the singular and stable reference we call self? The functionality in the brain representing the self is, biologically speaking, based on a collection of nonconscious neural patterns representing the body proper” (The feeling of what happens, p134). It shows that Damasio believes the self is constructed from neuronal patterns. The self is a thing within the conscious mind. For Metzinger however, there is no such thing as a self. He emphasises that the idea of self is highly flexible and dependent on context. As described above, subjects can feel an ownership over a rubber hand in the rubber hand-illusion. This sense of ownership can disappear quickly when someone hits the rubber hand with a hammer. Metzinger concludes that therefore there cannot be one self. However, the experience of self that we have arises from processes in the brain. Both authors highlight the importance of brain processes from which a self experience arises.
The function of consciousness: Both Metzinger and Damasio address the function of consciousness at some point during their career. Metzinger sees consciousness as a mean to optimise certain human behaviours. He describes the function of consciousness as a necessity for flexible interaction. An example is the emotion of regret described in a blog post of Frith and Metzinger (2016). This emotion is described as a powerful tool in integrating the norms of groups with that of the organism. The norms of a culture become part of the individual. Their conclusion was that conscious experience “was necessary for optimising flexible intrapersonal interactions and for the emergence of cumulative culture.” Damasio doesn’t go into the functionality of consciousness in a very detailed manner, but mentions in his book that the power of our brain is increased by minds and selves. The ability to adapt to complex environments is higher in a conscious mind. He explains that consciousness has lead to memory, reasoning, imagination and language. From that culture emerged, something that is not purely biology.
Both authors see the importance of conscious beings in the construction of culture. What Damasio’s theory seems to explain better is the need for consciousness to have emerged. In his theory, consciousness has an evolutionary benefit, with cultural implications as a byproduct of this. Metzinger seems to focus more on interpersonal interactions, from which the evolutionary benefit is less clear.
The autobiographical consciousness: A large part of Damasio’s theory focusses on the autobiographical self: the consciousness of past experiences and foreseen future. Unfortunately, this is a topic that is not included in Metzinger’s theory. Metzinger focusses on consciousness as it happens in discreet moments. However, the autobiographical consciousness an important part of consciousness, because we identify a large part of who we are with these experiences. It therefore seems natural that these kinds need to be included in theory.
Conclusion & personal remarks
The two theories outlined in this paper are very interesting takes on consciousness. What I like most about them is their take on consciousness as some sort of “virtual reality” /interpretation of the world rather than a direct contact with the world. At first this part of the theory does not seem to make sense. However if we think about for example radiation, something that is present, but cannot be directly experienced consciously by us, the idea that we are living through interpretation of the world rather than in direct contact with the world makes more sense. Damasio focuses on the neuronal background, and therefore has a more technical theory on consciousness. Metzinger’s philosophical background makes the theory more applicable towards cultural and social. The theories have some overlap but by looking at it from different perspectives, different issues get highlighted.