Words&Dirt

I came to this book by way of science fiction author Peter Watts, whose excellent novel Blindsight was influenced by Thomas Metzinger’s philosophy. The Ego Tunnel is the best book I’ve read about consciousness since Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind. Damasio and Metzinger have much in common, but I ultimately prefer Metzinger’s approach; as a neuroscientist, Damasio focuses mostly on the technical issues of how consciousness is constructed, whereas Metzinger’s philosophical background prompts him to explicitly to link our current knowledge about consciousness to relevant social, political, and ethical concerns. The Ego Tunnel explores a bevy of neuroscientific evidence––including but not limited to information about out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, meditation, brain disorders, and artificial intelligence––to probe our deepest questions about what consciousness is, how it occurs, and how our understanding of it might reshape human experience and culture.

Metzinger’s pet metaphor for describing consciousness is an extremely effective tool for readers seeking to build abstract models of their own thinking processes. The Ego Tunnel creates for us the appearance of a world, “a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us…The ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality” (6, emphasis his). Thinking of one’s conscious experience as lived through a tunnel has a lot of advantages if we are trying to understand and expose (insofar as is possible) the representative models our brains construct in order to present the world to us and help us interact with it. Tunnels have walls on all sides and are typically traversed in a linear fashion. These features map onto human experience, a phenomenon which is comprehensively mediated and enabled by self-generated representations that carry us inexorably forward in time. The commonplace notion of the “end of the tunnel” is also the termination of this metaphor’s usefulness: We never “get out” of the Ego Tunnel, because we are the Ego Tunnel. (Arguably, death involves leaving the tunnel, but since there is no good reason to believe experience is possible after death, there is little hope of discovering what it would be like to escape the tunnel with our identity and/or sensory faculties intact.)

While the tunnel metaphor effectively illustrates the forward momentum of consciousness through time, it fails to adequately capture another essential element of that journey, which is how brains construct the illusion of a consistent personal identity. This feature, which Damasio calls the “autobiographical self,” is responsible for tracking the narrative of one’s life and weaving stories––some true, some false––about who we are, who we’ve been, and who we might be in the future. Metzinger has many interesting things to say about consciousness, but is surprisingly taciturn when it comes to this critical component of our lived experience. He prefers to focus on consciousness as it occurs in particular, discreet moments, rather than how it creates a self-reflective narrative over the course of a lifetime.

This oversight is likely a contributing factor to Metzinger’s tenuous assertion that humans do not actually possess “selves.” This is not a novel idea, especially for a philosopher, and the pages spent on this topic are actually among the dullest in this otherwise concise and fascinating book. Metzinger suggests we should redefine the self as a “process” rather than a static entity (also not a novel philosophical idea): “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” (208). I take this to mean that, like myriad thinkers who came before him, Metzinger is simply refuting the idea of the immutable soul, or of the self as a fixed and/or immaterial locus of identity. Contrary to his claim, Metzinger has not proved that humans don’t possess selfhood, but rather that selfhood arises in a much different way than Western thinkers have traditionally posited (and let’s not forget that Eastern thinkers had this figured out millennia ago!). Even if we buy Metzinger’s arguments wholesale, it still seems both accurate and expedient to say people have selfhood. The difference is that we now understand selfhood as a phenomenological consequence of how our material bodies are structured––a semantic and conceptual shift rather than an empirical one.

Even if Metzinger fails to disprove the existence of selves, this book is worth reading solely for the artistry with which he describes the Ego Tunnel. Although he sometimes repeats himself unnecessarily, Metzinger has a tremendous talent for using language to break down mechanisms of consciousness, employing effective examples along the way (many of which include prompting the reader to think about how his or her brain is actively simulating the experience of interacting with the text). Reading the first few chapters of this book was about as close as I’ve ever come to a text-induced hallucination; I remember looking up from the page once or twice and surveying my kitchen, delightfully skeptical about the veracity of everything I was seeing. There were also times I began to see ghostly tunnel walls appear in my peripheral vision––an experience I’ve had in the past, but not while reading. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

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. (20, emphasis his)

As Metzinger acknowledges, he isn’t describing anything outside the valence of a high school physics class; nevertheless, a chill went through me when I read, “The evening sky is colorless.” I know this is true, but I don’t think about it very often, mostly because it’s not a pragmatically useful piece of information. Still, I don’t want to underestimate the potential of such statements, pedestrian as they may be for educated readers, to generate moments of clarity and creativity that are hard to come by from inside the maze of our quotidian habits. The Ego Tunnel rarely shows its borders or hints at anything external to itself, so taking a moment to dissolve into those peripheral parts of our lived experience is both fun and enlightening.

The fact that the experience of reading this book was so enjoyable (as opposed to a simple assessment of how informative it was) bespeaks Metzinger’s preoccupation with the phenomenology of consciousness. While there are conflicting views about the importance of phenomenology when it comes to constructing a theory of consciousness, for now I am firmly in the camp of Metzinger and others who believe that our experience of ourselves––regardless of how much it may sometimes diverge from scientific observations––is a hugely important part of the consciousness puzzle. That is because phenomenology is quite literally where we live. Even the best neuroscientists don’t escape their own Ego Tunnels: they interact with carefully cultivated and highly accurate representations of reality, not with reality itself. Moreover, experience is paramount when trying to use empirical findings to improve human societies, because it doesn’t much matter if we improve things by some quantitative or “objective” standard if people’s actual experience of being alive isn’t positively affected.

The main reason we should take seriously the phenomenological component of the consciousness question has to do with what Metzinger calls “transparency”:

Transparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us…We do not see neurons firing away in our brain but only what they represent for us. A conscious world-model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model––we look right through it, directly onto the world, as it were. (7)

This is another idea I’ve come across many times, but Metzinger’s language helped me internalize it in what felt like a brand new way. I think I originally became fascinated with neuroscience because it helped lift the veil somewhat on the transparent workings of my own mind and the minds of others. Because our brains present us with a hyper-realistic illusion of direct contact with the world, it is incredible to me that we’ve been able to draw up at least a basic blueprint of the virtually invisible mental mechanisms that generate this phenomenon. Additionally, the persistence of these transparent mechanisms ensures that, at least for now, we have to take seriously the ways in which our experience of being ourselves diverges from, conflicts with, or conforms to our findings about how the mind actually works. Knowledge of the Ego Tunnel doesn’t emancipate us from it, so we are faced with the dual project of getting to know the inconceivably intricate insides of the Tunnel while also striving to create good representations of the world as it exists beyond its impenetrable walls.

Confronted with the inescapable nature of the Ego Tunnel, some philosophers would descend into either solipsism or pessimism. Happily, Metzinger avoids both of these pitfalls. He doesn’t for a moment deny the existence of an objective, external world shared by all humans, and also doesn’t see the Ego Tunnel as a prison that precludes meaningful interaction and empathic understanding. Instead, he suggests that we ought to embrace a new era of consciously constructed experience, using any and all means available (collectively called “phenotechnology”) to “actively design the structure of our conscious minds” (218). This idea is a terrific complement to recent arguments in favor of “conscious evolution,” most thoroughly advocated for by Ted Chu in his book Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential. Metzinger thinks the best way to promote individual autonomy and improve the quality of human life is for us to engage in whatever combinations of physical, chemical, and spiritual behavior we can possibly think of, boldly seeking out efficacious states of consciousness while also discovering (and perhaps limiting human access to) destructive ones.

In order to make this kind of “experiential play” available worldwide, we will have to undertake seismic shifts in humanity’s values as well as our social, economic and political practices. Unlike some thinkers who downplay the consequences of naturalism for archaic value systems and social organizations, Metzinger concedes that naturalism has created an “ethical vacuum” that we must work hard to fill: “Scientists and academic philosophers cannot simply confine themselves to making contributions to a comprehensive theory of consciousness and the self. If moral obligation exists, they must also confront the anthropological and normative void they have created” (215). Metzinger strikes perfectly the chord that so many scientists and researchers fail to hear: discoveries about the workings of nature and the human mind invariably come with normative strings attached. We cannot divorce scientific inquiry from its ethical consequences, though we can and should work collaboratively to reduce bias and overreach.

Metzinger does not turn away from the fact that this process will be fraught and messy. He calls for the rise of “consciousness culture,” imploring individuals from all backgrounds to embark on quests to discover states of consciousness that provide our lives with meaning, happiness, and intersubjective richness: “Unless the interests of others are directly threatened, people ought to be free to explore their own minds and design their own conscious reality-models according to their wishes, needs, and beliefs” (238). There are many practical things we can do to help this process along, including the forumlation of sane drug policies, the introduction of “attention management” skills in public education, and redefining human labor in a way that is sensitive to the quality of conscious experience (good and bad) produced in workplaces. While Metzinger does a better job of problematizing these situations than of offering solutions, that is the proper role for a book of this sort. Metzinger cannot be responsible for generating solutions that ought to result from humanity’s collective debates, experiments, and missteps.

It’s worth noting that none of this will come to pass if we destroy Earth’s capacity to support human life, allow our civilizations to crumble under the weight of widespread poverty, or fall prey to “irrationalism and fundamentalism” (238). Metzinger has done a fine job of outlining where we should venture if all goes well in the coming decades and centuries, but his ideas do little to address more immediate problems like climate change, socioeconomic inequality, starvation, and political gridlock. He can hardly be faulted for this as solving these issues is not the focus of his research, but we should keep in mind that humanity’s accomplishments and potential for positive growth are highly contingent and fragile. For me, it goes without saying that if Metzinger’s “Consciousness Revolution” is achievable, it would markedly improve the quality of human life and help communities become more adaptable, vibrant, and resistant to collapse.

Rating: 8/10