Says who?

Summary of “The Ego Tunnel” of Thomas Metzinger.

The text below is an amateurish description of rather complex things I am not well versed in. So sometimes it renders as an attempt of an adult who forgot school’s physics to explain Newton’s laws to an 8-year old. The adult does a poor job, since he uses words like “phenomenology” and “irreducible” when addressing the 8-year old.

Narrative goes bottom up from the environment, to an individual and to a society.

I. The world model

1.
The basement is some sort of “objective reality”. The full insanity of chemical reactions, all sorts of gravity effects, the whole spectre of electromagnetic waves. In its entirety it’s inaccessible to us, we are not in direct contact with this reality whatsoever. We don’t really need to be though. Our perceptive organs read some part of it and pass the info to the brain.

The brain gets the input from all of our sensory systems and builds a model of the world, the model that would be valuable for our survival. A nice red apple in our model is something to digest. The same apple in the eyes of a bee is just an overdue flower she better pass on. It’s the same object of objective reality, yet the bee and I see it differently. Our nervous systems paint two different realities.

2.
How does the brain make it happen? The assumption is that constellations of neurons of different brain subsystems work in a synchronous “dance” of chemical and electrical signals, this dance produces a computational cloud of transformed information. The content of the cloud is our conscious experience, the stuff outside the cloud is not a part of our experience. The cloud is dynamic, its borders and content are in a constant flux (as you’ll see later there are a lot of things in a constant flux), that changes the phenomenology of our conscious experience

Dances and clouds are all metaphors, of course, but it’ll do (for better understanding one has to dive into “dynamic core hypothesis”). It’s the way the brain builds the comfortable coherent world we live in. The key is in the synchronous work of neurons. But it’s just a single frame of the film.

There’s a feedback loop between the results of such computations (complex coherent images of objects) and the low-level physical interaction of our sensory systems with the physical reality. The things we have already perceived define the things we can perceive in the next moment. The past builds a context for the present and future. That is why we live inside the smooth coherent movie of our perception.

3.
But what are past, future, and, most importantly, present moments? The temporal perception humans possess is a convenient way to specify the space of available possibilities. Sort of a desktop where objects, connections, projections, emotions and thoughts are scattered around waiting for us to grasp them and manipulate them. But these are too in a constant flux. So the things that are available right now are of a higher priority and thus they are marked as “this is now”. This way we get the sense of living through a present moment. It’d be good if I knew more about the contemporary conventions around the nature of space-time, but I don’t. At the moment. I do know it in the future though.

4.
How come it all sounds so weird and counter-intuitive to me? These things were never included in my lived reality, the only way to be aware of them is to read a rather strange book. It’s because the mechanisms providing these capabilities have been optimized and polished during the millions years of their development. They’re fast and reliable. They’re “transparent” to us. Our body is full of such things. It’s all business as usual with evolution, those who diverge from it either all have died or haven’t been produced yet

The hypothesis is that on the one hand, a conscious being has a way larger potential for extracting energy from the world around it, but on the other hand some sort of “meta-consciousness” that would allow reflection on the inner mechanisms of its working is too expensive and not beneficial enough

Around this moment Metzinger being a proper philosopher brings the problem of the limit of our understanding. The universe as a whole and our nature in particular have things that are beyond our understanding and will forever stay that way. Classic.

5.
Okay, model’s there, consciousness is there too. We are left with the main, nagging, absolutely human question of whys. What are we granted with such things for?

Aside from the notion that strictly speaking the world has no “whys” and nature just lives and grinds matter, we can assume that consciousness gives us a lot of cool perks. Such as: conditions with intrinsic motivation, unprecedented social coordination, long-term plans and hierarchies of goals and needs, access to long-term memory, behavioural control and learning. But for the most part it’s for you to be tortured by depressive garbage when you’re trying to sleep.

So, that’s a lot, but it’s still not clear, who’s it for? Who’s the observer of these wonders? No one. There’s no homunculus in your head.

II. The model of a self

1.
Apart from the model of the world, our brain also builds a rich and complex model of the body it resides in. This model absorbs everything that might be of use: our sense of position in space, body image, limbs image, our emotions, thoughts and history. This model is in flux as well. When we pick up a stick, our brain treats it as an actual extension of the body, the body model adapts to the fact that your hand is 3 feet longer now and more clumsy.

2.
The brain embeds the body-model into the world-model. An image of a person starts to live in its personal world. We feel as if we own this model, we identify with it: “I am my hands, emotions and thoughts”. It’s a birth of a first-person perspective, in the heart of the world drawn by our brain there’s a human and I am this human.

3.
After the ownership agency follows. “I want an apple”, “I’ll knock it down with a stick”. The “I” is a system for shifting our attention in accordance with patterns of reward we hold. It’s a system for body control, so this body would be capable of smart and complex behavior aligned with some hierarchy of goals.

The hypothesis is that the core essence of our Ego is the point the ray of our attention comes from. I am equal to the things I attend to. Not to the whole sum of my thoughts, emotions or body image. At each particular second I am, what my attention grasps. It’s like, for most of the last week I was “The Office”, the TV-show

Consciousness builds us the space to act, Ego gives us an ability to navigate the space in a sensical manner. Turns out Ego is a good way to complicate an ape so she’d become a better version of herself. Don’t mind the existential horror that comes with it.

III. Few Egos interact

At this moment we realize that others live through similar experiences.

Step by step we build empathy: the self-model integrates our sensory perception, it stands in the context of the world-model, Ego controls the model in a sensical way and at the end we have an ability to build models of others and map it against our model, thus we gain understanding of their states and goals.

At this point the story of a human as a specimen ends and the story of a human in society, culture and civilizsation begins. But it’s worthy of a separate summary, since the book there mostly poses questions rather than offers explanations.

IV. Criticism

Despite the fact that I find comfort and calmness in it, I treat this narrative with some caution. For instance, I don’t have any good questions related to these descriptions of brain mechanics. It may indicate either that I understood it completely, or that I didn’t understand a half of it. My bet’s on the latter. Plus, theories with a fragrance of nihilism are a weakness of mine. I support anything that humbles a human and human race.

In short, I’m both too incompetent and too biased to be able to criticize the things written in Ego Tunnel.

So I’ve tried to find something from those who are on a similar level with Metzinger. Here’s an article. It criticizes the monograph “Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”. It’ll do, since The Ego Tunnel is a simplified pop-version of the monograph.

If I understood it correctly, the problems with Metzinger’s framework are:

1. Replacing the notion of consciousness-object with the notion of consciousness-process doesn’t change anything. There’s no intellectual novelty in it, materialistic reductionism is hardly a new thing
2. Metzinger creates a false dichotomy between empirical research and “armchair philosophizing”. Both are valid and important
3. Metzinger supports the assumption that our experiences can be mapped to some concrete patterns of neural activity (neural correlates), that there’s actually a specific setup in the brain that indicates something like: “you are experiencing the redness of the red light”. No such things were found in actuality yet
4. And also Thomas Metzinger is a bad tempered bully who disrespects his established colleagues
   

If I were to answer these (for which I am largely unqualified):

1. It looks like the critic ignores the extensive base of empirical observations and experimental data trying to tell us that these are of no value and the same things could be concluded through pure reasoning
2. Derives from point #1. If you consider the scientific experimentation so fruitless no wonder you’d think there’s no opposition between “armchair philosophizing” and lab science
3. The only thing that actually highlights a weak spot in the concept. But again, Metzinger doesn’t shy away from it and actually highlights the importance of work that could help to find such neural correlates
4. This one only bumps my sympathies to Metzinger's views. It’s because I am in a state of a permanent passive pubertal protest against any kind of authority

That’s it.

Also, check this out (Metzinger on Sam Harris’ podcast)