Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS
Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS
Thomas Metzinger Consciousness, the Phenomenal
Self, and the
First-Person Perspective In my contribution I will offer a
solution to the most difficult aspect of problem of consciousness: The subjectivity of subjective experience,
the fact that consciousness is always experienced from an individual
first-person perspective. If one wishes to understand what phenomenal
consciousness actually is, one of the most important explananda will be
what
Thomas Nagel has called the “perspectivalness” of consciousness: The
fact that
conscious experience always appears to be experience for an
experiencing ego,
being bound to a subjective first-person perspective. I first very briefly sketch the
background theory as a strategy of accommodating the perspectivalness
of consciousness
within an empirically plausible theory of mental representation. An
important
step in adopting this strategy will consist in introducing a new
theoretical
entity: The phenomenal self-model. The model of the self
differs from
every other mental model in an essential point. It possesses a part,
which is
exclusively based on internally generated input: the part of the body
image
activated by proprioceptive input. For instance, recent research
concerning the
pain experienced in phantom limbs seems to point to the existence of a
genetically determined neuromatrix whose activation patterns could be
the basis
of the body image and the subjective experience of embodiment. The part
of this
neural activation pattern which is independent of external input
produces a
continuous representational basis for the body model of the self and in
this
way anchors it in the brain by generating a persistent functional link.
In
almost all situations when there is phenomenal consciousness at all,
there also
exists this unspecific, internal source of input. It is the most
"certain" and stable region within the model of the self. In this way
our consciousness becomes a centered consciousness. However, in order for the
functional/representational property of centeredness to become the
phenomenal
property of perspectivalness, the model of the system must become a
phenomenal self.
The pivotal question is: How does that which we commonly call the
phenomenal
first-person perspective emerge in a centered representational space? A
first-person perspective - I would suggest - emerges if the system no
longer
recognizes the model of the self which it itself activated as a
model.
If it did, representational and functional centeredness would remain,
but the
global phenomenal properties of selfhood and perspectivalness would
disappear.
In short: the system would have a self-model, but no phenomenal self.
The representational correlate - the self-model - is a functional
module,
episodically activated by the system in order to regulate its
interaction with
the environment. One can also develop a "teleofunctionalist"
approach: The model of the system then appears as a kind of organ which
emerges
through the binding of a certain set of micro-functional properties and
enables
the system to represent itself in its environment to itself. So the
self-model
is a transient computational module, possessing a long biological
history: It
is a weapon, which was developed in the course of a "cognitive
arms-race" (Andy Clark, 1989). A real phenomenal self however, only
emerges if the system, metaphorically speaking, "confuses" itself
with the internal model of itself which it itself has generated. I
claim that
the activation of a transparent self-model is the most important
necessary (but
not sufficient) condition for the instantiation of what philosophers
like to
call the "first-person perspective": While activating a special type
of representational object, the system gets caught in a naive-realistic
self-misunderstanding and in this way generates a phenomenal subject.
If time
allows, I want to close by briefly investigating what further
constraints have
to be met in order for a phenomenal first-person perspective to lay the
foundations
for social cognition: How do we get from a consciously represented
first-person
perspective to the cognitive representation of a first-person plural perspective? In the optional third part of my
lecture I offer some brief considerations of the role the humanities,
and of philosophy in particular, may have to play in
the current naturalization of the mind. The general anthropological
consequences of the research now being done on the neural
implementation of
mental functions are dramatic: In the next century we will be
confronted with a
shift in the general image of man, which contradicts almost all
traditional
anthropologies mankind has developed in the course of its history. New normative
issues emerge, e.g. in terms of an applied ethics for
neurotechnology. And,
obviously, the development triggered by the decade of the brain and the
new
research technologies available will eventually have a strong cultural impact. How can philosophy and
neuroscience cooperate in the new millennium, in order to productively
develop
solutions for these new problems in a rational manner? References: For readers interested in an
English summary of the theory sketched
above I recommend the following two publications: Metzinger,
T. (2005). Précis
of „Being No One“. In PSYCHE – An
InterdisciplinaryJournal of Research
on Consciousness, 11 (5), 1-35.
<http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/symposia/metzinger/precis.pdf> Metzinger,
T. (2003). Being No One - The Self-Model
Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. For readers interested in the
third part of my lecture or in a general
introduction into the problem of consciousness I recommend the
following two
publications: Metzinger,
T. (2000). Introduction: Consciousness Research at the End of the
Twentieth
Century. In T. Metzinger, ed., Neural
Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Metzinger,
T. (1995). Conscious Experience. Thorverton:
Imprint Academic & Paderborn: mentis. The first one can be downloaded
for free from
my website at http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/
