Publisher's Synopsis
According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as "selves" exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model". In "Being No One", Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blind-sight and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multi-level constraints for the concept of conscisousness.;Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.;Metzinger introduces two theoretical entities, the phenomenal self-model and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, that may form the decisive conceptual link between first-person and third-person approaches to the conscious mind and between consciousness research in the humanities and in the sciences. He also discusses the roots of intersubjectivity, artificial subjectivity (nonbiological phenomenal selves), and connections between philosophy of mind and ethics.
