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Thomas Metzinger: Yes, it's actually not so provocative, it's not an original idea at all. Many philosophers, David Hume, in the Anglo Saxon universe have said that for a long time. Who am I? The physical body certainly exists, the organism exists, but organisms are not selves. I don't deny that there is a self-y feeling. I certainly feel like someone, but there is no such thing. There is neither a non-physical thing in a realm beyond the brain or the physical world that we could call a self, but there's also no thing in the brain that we must necessary call a self.

Of course Buddhist philosophy had that point 2,500 years ago. So the idea that, as philosophers say, the self is not a substance, that it is something that can stay and hold itself in existence, even if the body or the brain were to perish, that's not a very breathtaking and new idea. What I am interested in is to understand why we just cannot believe that this is so. We have the feeling there is an essence in us, a deepest, inner core. We have this feeling that there must be something that is just not right about neuro-scientific theories about self consciousness, there's something beyond it. And I want to understand what that deepest core is because that's the origin of the subjectivity of consciousness.

But the experience of looking, of being directed to one's own feelings or to one's sensory perceptions of the outside world, this is itself an image. There is nobody looking at the image, it's like the camera is part of the picture or the viewing is itself a part of the process of viewing. This is how a first-person perspective emerges in our own case, the question is, okay, if it's not a thing, if it's not something in the brain, what kind of a process is it? And I think it's a process, as philosophers say, of representing, that is of making an image, and that process is not there all the time. You know you have a conscious self in dreams, you have one in your waking life. During anaesthesia or during dreamless sleep there is no such thing as this process of self-ing, if I may call it like that.

On the one hand I believe that we could have much better science and a much better science of consciousness if many of the involved researchers would do things like meditating or other practices in, say, altered states of consciousness, but as a philosopher I don't believe that in a strict sense that we can just look into our own minds and find facts there. I usually keep this completely separate, this is my private life, but I am also first a long-term meditator and just by chance in my early 20s I've had six or seven spontaneous out-of-body experiences. Nothing dramatic, just when falling asleep. They made me think a lot because I was just writing my PhD thesis on the mind/body problem and I just found out that everybody on the research frontier is a materialist...

Natasha Mitchell: So they locate the mind in the body and very much in the brain.Thomas Metzinger: Or to the point that they say that there has never been anything like a mind, that's the most ruthless form of eliminative materialism, as we call it.

for most people this only happens when they try to sit up or so, jump up, and then they suddenly really jump up and they float out and then they realise this physical body is behind them. That would be a very simple and natural out-of-body experience that hundreds of thousands of people have had on the planet. Then you suddenly have the experience that your self, your centre of thinking, of attending, is located out of your physical body for the first time and often you experience a second kind of bodily shape, an ethereal light body in which you can fly around. That is of course, or so I have claimed, the root of our belief in souls because human beings have had these experiences at all times and in all cultures, long before there was science or philosophy, and people have made theories about what could that be because it's pretty realistic, at least as realistic as your lucid dreams are. It's at least as realistic as waking life, and then you have a problem. I mean, are you going to tell people about this or are they going to send you to the psychiatrist...

atasha Mitchell: Exactly, you've spent many years trying to explain it, but scientifically. And in fact you describe yourself in your new book as an intrepid philosophical psychonaut. It sounds like you've tried all sorts of experiments on yourself, as well as in collaboration with scientists and their subjects. You got your surgeon to alter your anaesthetic regime when you went under surgery once.Thomas Metzinger: Yes, they were really cynical. They said, 'So young man, you've been writing your thesis about the mind/body problem. Observe yourself now!' And they knocked me out and it was very nasty, it was a very death-oriented waking up phase, there was nothing that resembled an out-of-body experience, it was in parts frightening. No special discovery there. But if you want to enhance your lucid dreaming, one thing you could do, a simple old classic, is stop drinking at noon, then stare at a glass of water just before you go to sleep in a really thirsty condition, then you place half a tablespoon of salt in your cheek and go to sleep and make a firm commitment as soon as you are there again and you realise you cannot lift it to drink, you will become aware that you're dreaming now. I can guarantee what's going to happen.

Full lucidity means that you become aware of your own agency, that you can control the dream world and your own body, you can go through walls or make experiments, and there are very interesting experiments. For instance, you could ask, as a philosopher, another dream figure if they actually think they have a conscious mind of their own or if they actually think they're a subsystem of your dreaming brain right now.

Thomas Metzinger: But more seriously what I'm of course interested in is the functional building blocks of what I call the human self model. So in the transition from the ordinary to the lucid dream, for instance, you gain all these memories you have lost, who you are in waking life, that you have had lucid dreams perhaps before, and most importantly perhaps you can control the focus of your attention, focus your own mind. I don't know if you've ever realised this but in ordinary dreams you cannot really control your attention. And then it's of course an amazing, a unique state of consciousness from a theoretical point of view because it's the only state of consciousness where you are not a naïve realist, where you actually experience everything as an internal simulation and you lose this feeling of moving in a real external world. Then you know you are moving in a simulation and you can try all kinds of things.

Thomas Metzinger: Because one of many elements of the conscious self I need to understand is the sense of ownership. Long before language and concepts you have the feeling 'this is me', and we also have this, for instance, in using tools. It may be very important when you use a rake or a stick for the period while you use it to actually incorporate it into your body image. What I was interested in was is there something like a global sense of ownership. Not just a feeling of owning your hand or maybe owning a thought, but owning the body as a whole, and can that be experimentally manipulated, that was the question.

My theory—big, unintelligible philosophical theory—says that we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image. And if my theory is correct, there should be just this one element of global identification and it should be easy to control it experimentally. That was the idea behind it. But I must also...one warning, the idea of global ownership for our body as whole is a dangerous idea because it introduces a second self, like a little man that does the owning.

what do you think was most adaptive about...most beneficial to us as a species about this unique sense of selfhood that it seems that we possess?Thomas Metzinger: Well, in general of course it's good for an animal to have a model of its own body. How fast can I run? Should I pick a fight with this guy? Or better not? How far can I jump to the next branch? How heavy am I? What are my collision properties? That was important. So I think bodily self models have been on this planet for a long time. The next invention was emotions, to know what is in your own interest and in the interest of your offspring, to have the experience of being...I guess, bonding, you say in English, to other conscious selves.

In your work you're also very concerned about our changing conception of consciousness with the help of neuroscience, and this is something you're very enthusiastic about, given your partnerships with scientists for many years, but you're calling for a new field of ethics, Thomas, a ethics of consciousness. What would be the focus of such an ethics and why do you see it as being so crucial?Thomas Metzinger: We do have this brand new discipline since 2002 of neuro-ethics where one investigates the ethical consequences of new technologies that come out of neuroscience, like new lie detectors, cognitive enhancers, brain implants and so on. Our image of ourselves, the image of man, of humankind, is changing faster and more dramatically then through any other scientific revolution in the past. In a way we are destroying a lot of what mankind has believed in during the last 4,000 years, but it's also clear that in this emerging vacuum neuroscience will not be able to put something new into this vacuum.

how will our culture actually react to a naturalistic turn in our image of man, if there's no supernatural root even in our minds anymore, and we actually have to come to terms with the fact that not only our bodies but also our minds are results of a process that had no goal, that was driven by chance events...I mean, how are we going to come to terms with this? Will we develop a culture of denial, or will we all become vulgar materialists? And I think something that could help us to take this step in integrating all this brand new knowledge and the new potentials for changing our brains and our minds technologically...

Thomas Metzinger: And pharmaceutically, that's what we're researching in my cognitive enhancers group...how are we going to make this historical transition in an optimal way? And I think, to put it very simply, we could do it by just thinking not only about what is a good action but what is a good state of consciousness. What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? How can neuroscience help us with optimising education? What states of consciousness are we allowed to impose, to force upon animals? Are all these experiments in, say, primate research, in consciousness research, in neuroscience ethically tenable? What states of consciousness should be illegal in our society? New drugs. What states of consciousness do we want to foster and cultivate?

It's also a question of preserving our dignity in the face of these sometimes very sobering discussions, and in developing a cultural response to it. Can modern science help me? It's not only about defending ourselves, it's also about what I call riding the tiger; can all this new knowledge help us to improve our autonomy, maybe also our rationality? How can I take responsibility and charge for the way I deal with my own brain? Can it help us to die better deaths? Who knows? But I think we should all, not only philosophers and scientists but all of us, start to think about what we want to do with all these new brain/mind technologies. Just looking the other way won't make it go away.

The idea that our bodies can be controlled by an outside force is a pretty astonishing one. "This is absolutely out of my control," insists Prof Haggard, as his muscles continue to move. "I'm not doing it, Christina is. I'm just a machine, and she is operating me."

What does this mean in terms of free will? "We don't have free will, in the spiritual sense. What you're seeing is the last output stage of a machine. There are lots of things that happen before this stage – plans, goals, learning – and those are the reasons we do more interesting things than just waggle fingers. But there's no ghost in the machine."

philosophically, morally, and – most worryingly – legally. "We understand what brain areas are responsible for impulsive behaviour, and which bits are responsible for inhibiting that behaviour. There's a whole brain network associated with holding back from things you shouldn't do. "What happens if someone commits a crime, and it turns out that there's a lesion in that brain area? Is that person responsible? Is the damage to the machine sufficient for us to exempt them from that very basic human idea that we are responsible for our actions? I don't know." He refers to a major project in America, where "lawyers, neuroscientists, philosophers and psychiatrists are all trying to work out what impact brain science has on our socio-legal sense of responsibility". This runs shockingly contrary to the sense of freedom that we feel in terms of controlling our actions, on which we base our whole sense of self and system of morality. "As far as I know," says Prof Haggard, "all societies hold individuals responsible for their actions. Even in animal societies, individuals have reputations. Non-human primates adjust their behaviour according to how other animals will respond. Junior males will not steal from older males, because they know they'll get beaten up. That's the beginning of social responsibility; the awareness that your behaviour has effects on the behaviour of others, and can have good or bad consequences.

"It's a rule that we need to have as social animals. You couldn't have society unless, if you do something wrong, you pay for it. The question is, what do we do when people don't have the brain machinery to play by the rules – or decide not to play by them? That's not a scientific question. That's a moral one." Maybe, I suggest, we've over-defined free will. Perhaps it doesn't exist in the mystical breaking-the-laws-of-the-universe way, but there is a sense in which this "me", this brain and body, responds to the world, reacts to information, tries to shape its environment; takes decisions. Can we not pull free will back to something more defensible? He taps his fingers.

The solution is that culture made writing easy on the eye, by shaping letters to be what the eye likes. The idea that culture shapes our artifacts to be good for us is not new. What’s new here is a specific hypothesis for what writing should look like in order to be good for us.

To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.

When light hits our retina, what our brains would like to do is instantaneously generate a perception of what the world looks like. Alas, our brain can’t do this instantaneously. Our brains are slow. It takes around a tenth of a second for your perception to be built, and that’s a long time when you’re moving about. If you perceived the world the way it was when light hit your eye, you’d be having a tenth-of-a-second old view of the world.

First consider illusions like those I discussed above. One often feels as if what we see is due to some kind of direct “reading” of the real physical world. But our brain can’t just passively react to the incoming stream of visual information, lest it have an old perception of the world. Instead, it must actively generate a guess about the near future, which helps drive home that our perception is always an internal concoction by your brain. In fact, most of the input to your visual system is feedback from that very visual system.

Second, consider forward-facing eyes and binocular vision. When we see with two eyes in the same direction, we have one unified visual perception. We have what feels like a single viewpoint, one that is emanating roughly from a point between our two eyes. Furthermore, our single viewpoint is always filled with two copies of the world that you hardly ever notice. When you fixate on something out in front of you, then objects nearer and farther split into two perceptual copies, each rendered as transparent in your perception.

This allows you to see objects, and to see beyond them. For example, you can see your own nose from opposite sides at all times, but it is rendered as partially transparent and so does not block your view of the world beyond. The more one analyzes the phenomenology of binocular vision, the stranger it seems. But it doesn’t feel strange, because these are perceptual facets that our brain knows how to interpret. They are needed as part of your unified view of the world in order to incorporate the fact that it is really built out of two views of the world. Although, in a sense, you are perceiving fictions, they are fictions that allow you to more veridically see the world.

And, lastly, consider color vision. This is a case that helps us better understand that it is not so much whether you see the world as it is, but how much of the world’s reality your are privy to seeing. Colors are primarily about the underlying emotions and states of those around us, as seen through the window of skin, and the physiological changes in the blood. The spectrum of skin is complicated, but it varies over two dimensions that matter most for sensing the states of others, the concentration and oxygenation of skin.

The question is, what does the concentration and oxygenation of blood in the skin of others “truly” look like? Or, what do the emotions those blood variables signify “truly” look like? The interesting thing here is that these blood dimensions and these emotions are “really there”, but there is little sense to what their “real look” might be. Colors serve the role of what they look like, but does red really look like oxygenated blood or really look like anger? I’m not sure this is a sensible question. What matters is that that qualitative perceptual state is given a meaning or association to us, and so serves its purpose.