Thomas Metzinger Quotes

#1. The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.

Thomas Metzinger

#2. You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.

Thomas Metzinger

#3. Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.

Thomas Metzinger

#4. A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.

Thomas Metzinger

#5. As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.

Thomas Metzinger

#6. Conscious experience as such is an exclusively internal affair: Once all functional properties of your brain are fixed, the character of subjective experience is determined as well.

Thomas Metzinger

#7. The self is not a thing, but a process.

Thomas Metzinger

#8. Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.

Thomas Metzinger

#9. Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.

Thomas Metzinger

#10. Virtual reality is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible - ideally, by creating a subjective sense of "presence" and full immersion in the user.

Thomas Metzinger

#11. Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.

Thomas Metzinger

#12. As far as inner action is concerned, we are only rarely truly self-determined persons, for the major part of our conscious mental activity rather is an automatic, unintentional form of behavior on the subpersonal level.

Thomas Metzinger

#13. I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

Thomas Metzinger

#14. Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

Thomas Metzinger

#15. All attention is introspection.

Thomas Metzinger

#16. Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

Thomas Metzinger

#17. Retribution is really a stone age concept.

Thomas Metzinger

#18. If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little "Think me!" and our mind begins to wander.

Thomas Metzinger

#19. At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.

Thomas Metzinger

#20. The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".

Thomas Metzinger

#21. Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans, avoid risks, and treat our fellow human beings fairly - for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern ourselves.

Thomas Metzinger

#22. When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.

Thomas Metzinger

#23. Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our reality tunnel.

Thomas Metzinger

#24. Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

Thomas Metzinger

#25. I believe that gut feelings, the sense of balance, and spatial self-perception are so firmly coupled to our biological body that we will never be able to leave it experientially on a permanent basis.

Thomas Metzinger

#26. Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.

Thomas Metzinger

#27. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.

Thomas Metzinger

#28. As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.

Thomas Metzinger

#29. Subjective time flows forward, the phenomenal self is embedded into this flow, an inner history unfolds. That it is why it is not a bubble, but a tunnel: There is movement in time.

Thomas Metzinger