Thomas Metzinger (born 1958) is a German philosopher of mind, professor emeritus at the University of Mainz, best known for the claim in Being No One (2003) and The Ego TunnelTunnel. The descent at the start of a journey. Still middle-world territory, all the way down: the Lower-World begins only where you emerge. More about this (2009) that there are no such things as selves, and that what we experience as a self is a model the brain builds of the whole organism, so seamless that we do not experience it as a model at all. He has also studied ‘pure awareness’ in meditation and called for a moratorium on research that might create suffering in machines. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that there is no one, single ‘I’ and that the everyday self is a construct, but holds that a construct is real at its own level, and that it is only one part of who a person is.
Who is Thomas Metzinger? #
A philosopher who works where philosophy meets the brain sciences. He was born in Frankfurt in 1958, took his doctorate at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1985, and became a professor at the University of Mainz in 2000, where he is now professor emeritus of theoretical philosophy. He was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2022.1
His main books are Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003), a long technical work, and The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2009), which sets out the same ideas for a general reader. His more recent The Elephant and the Blind (2024) is about the experience of pure consciousness in meditation. By his own account he has practised meditation twice a day for more than forty years.2
What is the self-model theory? #
Metzinger’s account of why we feel like selves. The brain, on his view, builds a model of the whole organism, its body, its feelings, its thoughts and its place in the world, and keeps updating it from moment to moment. He calls this the phenomenal self-model. What we experience as being someone is the content of that model.3
The key to the theory is what he calls transparency. We do not experience the self-model as a model, any more than we notice a clean window when we look through it. We look straight through it and take what it shows for reality, so that the model is lived as a real, solid self. The phenomenal self, in the publisher’s summary of Being No One, is “not a thing but an ongoing process”. From this Metzinger draws his best-known conclusion, that “no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self.”4 The Ego Tunnel takes the image further. Each of us lives inside a kind of tunnel of experience built by the brain, mistaking the tunnel for the world and the self-model for ourselves.5
What is his work on pure awareness? #
A long study of what experience is like when almost everything is taken out of it. In 2019 Metzinger founded a research project on what he calls minimal phenomenal experience, the simplest form of consciousness, reported by meditators as ‘pure’ awareness, awareness with no particular content, no thoughts and often no sense of self. The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness (2024) brings together philosophy, science and more than five hundred first-hand reports from meditators, and is free to read online.6
What does he say about artificial intelligence? #
That nobody should risk creating artificial suffering. Metzinger served on the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence from 2018 to 2020. In a paper of 2021 he called for a global moratorium on ‘synthetic phenomenology’, research that might, deliberately or by accident, give machines conscious experience, on the ground that such systems could suffer and that nobody yet knows how to tell.7
How does Metzinger’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
On the self first. In Therapeutic Shamanism there is no one, single ‘I’; what people take to be ‘I’ is made of different parts, each with its own needs and drives.8 The part most people mean when they say ‘I’ is the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, the ego, and it is a construct, a complex thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this woven from the stories we tell ourselves, the beliefs we adopt, the roles we play and the masks we wear. Most people are so thoroughly caught up in it that they take it for who they are, and only things like meditation or psychotherapy begin to show it for the bundle of stories it is.9 Metzinger’s self-model, seen through so completely that it is lived as a solid self, describes a similar trap from the side of the brain sciences. See What is the inner tribe? and What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the Body?
Then on awareness. Behind the stories there is the Aware SelfAware Self. The Witness: not a part of the self but a capacity for awareness, cultivated by hollowing-out, that can watch the flow of thoughts without being caught in them. More about this, also called the Witness, which can watch the flow of thoughts without being caught in them.10 It is not a part of the self but a capacity for awareness, with compassion and equanimity. With a lot of practice in meditation it is possible, for a while, simply to be, in pure awareness empty of thoughts and sensations; and meditation, psychotherapy and the shamanic hollowing-outHollowing-out. The core, lifelong discipline of setting aside the middle-world self, its stories, agendas and preconceptions, so the Guides can work through us. The image: the shaman as hollow bone. Read the full answer process all cultivate the Aware Self, drawing awareness back out of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer stories.11 Metzinger studies something close to this from the outside, through the reports of meditators. See What is hollowing-out? and How is journeying different from meditation, and can the two work together?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whether a construct is real. Metzinger does not say that everything is one, or that experience is unreal; his claim is that the self we experience is a model, with nothing beyond the modelling standing behind it. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that the middle-world self is a construct, and adds that a construct is not therefore unreal. Things can be real at one level and not at another, and one level does not cancel the other out.12 The ego is very much real in the everyday middle-world, and trying to deny a part of ourselves does not make it go away; as the saying goes, “What we resist, persists”, and a denied part becomes the Shadow. So the ego is not dissolved but reined in, and the way to do that is not only to rise towards Spirit but to put down roots in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul.13 See What is ego death?
The other difference is about what lies beyond the everyday self. Metzinger, as a naturalist, explains the self-model as something the brain produces. In Therapeutic Shamanism the middle-world self is only one of the parts of a person. Like everything in the middle-world it is temporary, and in time it fades; the Lower-World Soul and the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer Spirit always were, are and will be.14 So seeing through the everyday self does not leave no one there. It opens the way to the deeper parts of who a person is. See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death, and what happens when we die?
What do critics say about Metzinger’s view of the self? #
The philosopher Dan Zahavi holds that Metzinger defines the self too narrowly. Metzinger, on Zahavi’s reading, takes a self to mean an unchanging thing that exists in its own right; there are other, more modest accounts of what a self is, which his arguments leave standing. As Zahavi puts it, “Metzinger’s skeptical conclusion would only be warranted if his definition of the self were the only one available.”15
Metzinger’s own position, set out in his books and not as a reply to Zahavi, is that the experience of being a self is real. What he denies is that anything beyond the ongoing process of self-modelling stands behind it, and he has written at length on how that process works and on how, in meditation and other unusual states, it can change.16
