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An Interview with Thomas Metzinger: What Is the Self?

You Are Not Who You Think You Are
Michael Taft 09/28/2012 02:15

Thomas Metzinger, Ph.D. Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes

Gutenberg-Universitt Mainz Thomas Metzinger is currently Professor of
Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitt Mainz and an
Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study (FIAS). He is also
Director of the Neuroethics Research Unit in Mainz and Director of the MIND
Group at the FIAS.

Michael W. Taft: Youve written at great length about the experience of

selfhood in human beings. So lets start off by asking, What is the self?

Thomas Metzinger: The first thing to understand, I believe, is that there is no

thing like the self. Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of
reality, in the sense of elementary building blocks that endure over time. The
first person pronoun I doesnt refer to an individual object like a football or a
bicycle, or to some mysterious category of invisible thingsit just points to
the speaker of the current sentence. The speaker simply is the person as a
whole.

A self also couldnt be something you have (as we might say it), because then there would be another little man hiding
behind it and owning the self. It also couldnt be something deep inside yourself, because the you would be identical with
only one of your constituting parts. We are living systems, embodied, dynamic. In short, there is no thing in the brain or
outside in the world, which is us. We are processes.

Selves are a very interesting and vivid and robust element of conscious experience in some animals. This is a conscious
experience of selfhood, something philosophers call a phenomenal self, and how this self subjectively appears to the
organism as a whole is entirely determined by local processes in the brain, at every instant, from moment to moment.
Ultimately, its a physical process. Today, the best way to describe self consciousness still is as a representational
process: an image that is sometimes generated in the brain, an internal placeholder for the system as a whole, a
neurocomputational tool. Sometimes its not generated, for example in dreamless, deep sleep. Its a very fragile and
vulnerable, intermittent phenomenon, but there is no metaphysical entity such as the self which exists independently of
the brain.

Michael W. Taft: Yet the experience of being a self, of being someone, is very persistent.

Thomas Metzinger: Absolutelythat is the amazing part of it: Something virtual is experienced as a reality, the systems
currently best hypothesis about itself becomes something that feels substantial a lived reality. Its the robust
phenomenology of the selfthe very convincing sense that we are somebodythat makes this nave misunderstanding
so very easy for beings like us. I think the self is an intermittent and complex process, but not a thing. This is not
provocative at all, a dramatic statement or dramatic new theory. I would guess that most cognitive scientists,
neuroscientists, and almost all philosophers today would subscribe to the idea that is there no thing or metaphysical
substance like the self that can exist independently of the brain. In science and philosophy, the concept of such a
metaphysical self is long gone.

But somehow for our life, and in our biological history, the feeling of being a self is and was very important, and for many
reasons. Complex organisms do not only have to predict the world, but also their own future behaviorthey have to
minimize surprise on all levels. They have to successfully control themselves, as a whole. A conscious self-model is a
perfect tool to achieve this. If an animal or a child wants to learn how to develop future planning, control momentary
impulses, delay rewards and so on, then it is critical that it has an inner image of itselfhowever delusionalthat tells it:
It is you who will reap the fruits in the future; it is yourself who will get lung cancer if you keep on smoking; your
preferences will remain stable and it will be your very own joy, satisfaction, your own suffering and regret! One thing we

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are all beginning to understand is how self-deception can be adaptive. Probably evolution has built some stable forms of
self-deception right into our conscious self-models. One important function is mortality denial, I guess. We like to believe
in an innermost essence or core, because it allows us to deny our finitude, or at least leave an open door of hope for life
after death. And thats also why its not going to go away. I think the folk-psychological, folk-metaphysical notion of self is
going to stay in our everyday life and in our culture.

Michael W. Taft: If the self is some kind of transient mental representation, what is its function?

Thomas Metzinger: The body and the mind are constantly changing. Nothing in us is ever really the same from one
moment to the next. Yet the self represents a very strong phenomenal experience of sameness, and its clear this would
be adaptive or helpful for a biological organism that needs to plan for the future. If you want to hide some food for winter
or you want to save some money in your bank accounts or work on your reputation, youre planning for future success
and you wouldnt do that if you didnt have the very strong feeling that its going to be the same entity that gets the reward
in the future. That it was the same entity in the past that got cheated, injured, hurt by someone, and that is now longing
for retaliation, revenge, or something like that. Obviously, for the evolution of culture, a fiction of personal identity was
also necessary. Just think about responsibility and culpability in the context of evolving a legal system; or of the need to
build a reputation in larger, growing groups of early human history. A self-model is not something in the brain or in
philosophy, it is also something social and public. Personal websites and Facebook accounts are public self-models
toothey have a function, and they make something happen.

So obviously in a biological or bodily context it may be good to have this experience that all of this, the reaping of the
fruits, is going to happen to the same person. But again, strictly speaking, its never really happening to the same person,
but its also not true that there is nobody there. Of course, there is a sufficient similarity over time, the organism survives,
genes are copied, books are written. We dont arbitrarily change and its kind of a flux. I like very much the image the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once used.

He said you could have a ropea long rope made of very different strings of different color. And no string, neither the red
string nor the blue nor the green one, would go through the whole length of the rope. Yet the rope could be very robust,
strong, and stable, even though there is not one thread that goes through it from beginning to end. I think thats a good
image for how we are on the bodily level, as well as on a psychological level.

Despite this, we have robust experiences of autonomy and self-determination. We have the subjective experience of
controlling our behavior, and we also have an experience of mental self- determination, controlling our attention, our
mental state and all of these things. As modern science shows, some of these inner experiences may not be fully
veridical, but just adaptive. Perhaps some of them are also efficient self-fulfilling prophecies. It may be functional to have
the robust experience that you are in control, but from the thirdperson perspective of science, it seems that such
experiences may not reflect the truth of our nature. What really happens is perhaps best described as an agent-free
process of dynamical self-organization. This process has many layers from the bodily to the social and it manifests
itself in itself, through conscious experience. Whenever we dont understand something, we hallucinate a little man right
into reality: a computer that suddenly acts up, weather gods causing thunder and throwing down lightning bolts,
invisible demons causing diseases, Cartesian Egos that deliberately think their very own thoughts. It may work for a
while, but it also causes considerable confusion. The self is not a thing, but a process.

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