Keyword-psychology

The same general idea holds for more complex states: Their phenomenal
content is precisely that aspect of a state (say, of happiness plus
relaxation) that not only emerges naturally in everyday situations but
can also be caused by a psychoactive substance—or, at least in principle,
triggered by an evil neuroscientist experimenting on a living brain in a
vat. The problem of consciousness is all about subjective experience,
about the structure of our inner life, and not about knowledge of the
outer world.
One way of looking at the Ego Tunnel is as a complex property of the
global neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). The NCC is that set of
neurofunctional properties in your brain sufficient to bring about a conscious
experience. There is a specific NCC for the redness of the rose
you experience, another for the perceptual object (that is, the rose as a
whole), and yet another underlying your accompanying feeling of happiness
and relaxation. But there is also a global NCC—that is, a much
larger set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole, underpinning
your experiential model of the world, the totality of everything
you subjectively feel. The incessant information flow in this global
NCC is what creates the tunnel, the world in which you live your conscious
life.
But what is this “you”? As I claimed at the outset, we will never have
a truly satisfying comprehensive scientific theory of the human mind if
we don’t dissolve the core of the problem. If we want everything to fall
into place—if we want to understand the big picture—then this is the
challenge. Why is consciousness subjective? The most important question
I seek to answer is why a conscious world-model almost invariably
has a center: a me, an Ego, an experiencing self. What exactly is the self
that has the rubber-hand illusion? What exactly is it that apparently
leaves the physical body in an OBE? What exactly is it that is reading
these lines right now?
An Ego Tunnel is a consciousness tunnel that has evolved the additional
property of creating a robust first-person perspective, a subjective
view of the world. It is a consciousness tunnel plus an apparent self. This
is the challenge: If we want the big picture, we need to know how a genuine
sense of selfhood appears. We have to explain your experience of yourself as feeling the tactile sensation in the rubber hand, of yourself as
understanding the sentences you’re reading right now. This genuine
conscious sense of selfhood is the deepest form of inwardness, much
deeper than just being “in the brain” or “in a simulated world in the
brain.” This nontrivial form of inwardness is what this book is about.