Being No One
"In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.". "Metzinger introduces two theoretical entities - the "phenomenal self-model" and the "phenomenal model of the intentionality relation" - that may form the decisive conceptual link between first-person and third-person approaches to the conscious mind and between consciousness research in the humanities and in the sciences.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
13mentions
11people
2013–2026years
54% recommend46% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas:
- a model of your environment - desires - a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space) - the ability to take action - the perception of yourself having agency - persistence of these processes even without input - unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)
If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:
- are aware of their chat environment - have programmed desires - are aware of themselves acting in their environment - can take actions like search, tool calling, etc. - understand they can take these actions - DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input - DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)
This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.
[1] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-metzinger/th... & https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633086/being-no-one/
- I can recommend Being No One, by Thomas Metzinger, for essays.
For sci-fi, have a look at Blindsight, by Peter Watts (for free on his website: Https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.html)
- Yes, Blindsight is also the book that pointed me towards Metzinger’s Being No One.
- I had anesthesia once. Subjectively it’s about as close to being dead (or simply “not existing”) as I can imagine. One moment I was perfectly awake, and the next moment I was hearing the sounds of people talking around me and I groggily became aware of my doctor getting me to acknowledge him.
There is still the question though, was my subjective experience post-surgery accurate? It’s conceivable that consciousness is suppressed to varying degrees, while the creation of memories is more significantly impacted. I may have had some degree of consciousness but my subjective post-surgery experience has no knowledge of it.
And putting aside anesthesia altogether you have the phenomena of people that get blackout drunk. For some period of time they were up, senses receiving input and processing it even if their actions were high impaired, yet afterwards there is no memory. (There are of course degrees to this too, sometimes a person remembers the tiniest pieces, as if from a dream, sometimes not at all)
The entire topic invites the question: Is consciousness required for intelligent behavior? Unless you include consciousness as part of the definition of intelligent, it is not an easy question.
Somewhat on that topic I’d highly recommend the book Being no One by Thomas Metzinger
- Metzinger, Being No One (2004) may be just the step forward to which you refer. The prereflexive sense of self (as, say, a point-source of will and identity) is empirically inaccurate and faulty, and Metzinger attacks philosophy grounded in this untranscendable experience. But, unlike many philosophers, European or Buddhist, who satisfy to negate the ontological status of the self, Metzinger develops a theory of the self which is conceptually constrained by clinical medicine's empirical totality.
Two warnings about Metzinger, though: (1) a mood leaks through his writing, a sort of nihilistic determinism that his rigorous philosophy relentlessly evokes, but which his assertions do not imply; and (2) it is quite difficult reading, like a new Kant, lucid yet dense, requiring of a layman to assiduously infer and integrate the language of cognitive science.
- There are actually highly interesting developments at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, one of them being the works of Thomas Metzinger (see, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/d...).
It's simply wrong to state that research into consciousness is at the state of "it emerges from neural activity".
