The Deepest Inner Core
Professor Thomas Metzinger is based at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz in Germany, and has long collaborated with neuroscientists and artificial intelligence researchers and others. And in his new book, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, he makes the case that there is no such thing as a self.
In Sep. 2009, he was interviewed by Natasha Mitchell for the All in the Mind program on ABC Radio National. Natasha began by asking: “If I was to ask you who you are, the self that goes by the name of Thomas Metzinger from Germany, I wonder how you’d answer, because you make the provocative argument that there is no such thing as a self, that there never has been, that there never will be.”
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.
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