arose in the process of biological evolution on this planet. The Ego is a
tool—one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behavior and
understanding the behavior of others. We each live our conscious life in
our own Ego Tunnel, lacking direct contact with outside reality but possessing
an inward, first-person perspective. We each have conscious
self-models—integrated images of ourselves as a whole, which are firmly
anchored in background emotions and physical sensations. Therefore,
the world simulation constantly being created by our brains is built
around a center. But we are unable to experience it as such, or our selfmodels
as models. As I described at the outset of this book, the Ego
Tunnel gives you the robust feeling of being in direct contact with the
outside world by simultaneously generating an ongoing “out-of-brain
experience” and a sense of immediate contact with your “self.” The central
claim of this book is that the conscious experience of being a self
emerges because a large portion of the self-model in your brain is, as
philosophers would say, transparent. We are Ego Machines, but we do not have selves. We cannot leave the
Ego Tunnel, because there is nobody who could leave. The Ego and its
Tunnel are representational phenomena: They are just one of many possible
ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective
experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of
presenting information about the world, and the Ego is merely a complex
physical event—an activation pattern in your central nervous system.
If, say, for ideological or psychological reasons, we do not want to
face this fact and give up our traditional concept of what a “self” is, we
could formulate weaker versions. We could say that the self is a widely
distributed process in the brain—namely, the process of creating an Ego
Tunnel. We could say that the system as a whole (the Ego Machine), or
the organism using this brain-constructed conscious self-model, can be
called a “self.” A self, then, would simply be a self-organizing and selfsustaining
physical system that can represent itself on the level of global
availability. The self is not a thing but a process. As long as the life
process—the ongoing process of self-stabilization and self-sustainment—
is reflected in a conscious Ego Tunnel, we are indeed selves. Or rather,
we are “selfing” organisms: At the very moment we wake up in the
morning, the physical system—that is, ourselves—starts the process of
“selfing.” A new chain of conscious events begins; once again, on a
higher level of complexity, the life process comes to itself.
Nevertheless, as I have repeatedly emphasized, there is no little man
inside the head. In addition, weaker versions don’t take the phenomenology
really serious. True, upon your awakening from deep sleep, the
conscious experience of selfhood emerges. As I described in the chapter
on out-of-body experiences, this may have to do with the body image
becoming available for self-directed attention. But there is no one doing
the waking up, no one behind the scenes pushing the Reboot button, no
transcendental technician of subjectivity. Today, the key phrase is “dynamical
self-organization.” Strictly speaking, there is no essence within
us that stays the same across time, nothing that could not in principle be
divided into parts, no substantial self that could exist independently of
the body. A “self” in any stronger or metaphysically interesting sense of
the word just does not seem to exist. We must face this fact: We are selfless
Ego Machines. It is hard to believe this. You cannot believe it. This may also be the
core of the puzzle of consciousness: We sense that its solution is radically
counterintuitive. The bigger picture cannot be properly reflected in
the Ego Tunnel—it would dissolve the tunnel itself. Put differently, if we
wanted to experience this theory as true, we could do so only by radically
transforming our state of consciousness.
Maybe metaphors can help. Metaphorically, the central claim of this
book is that as you were reading these last several paragraphs, you—the
organism as a whole—were continuously mistaking yourself for the
content of the self-model currently activated by your brain. But
whereas the Ego is only an appearance, it may be false to say that it is an
illusion; metaphors are always limited. All of this is happening on a
very basic level in our brains (philosophers call this level of informationprocessing
“subpersonal”; computer scientists call it “subsymbolic”).
On this fundamental level, which forms the preconditions of knowing
something, truth and falsity do not yet exist, nor is there an entity who
could have the illusion of a self. In this ongoing process on the subpersonal
level, there is no agent—no evil demon that could count as the
creator of an illusion. And there is no entity that could count as the
subject of the illusion, either. There is nobody in the system who could
be mistaken or confused about anything—the homunculus does not exist.
We have only the dynamical self-organization of a new coherent
structure—namely, the transparent self-model in the brain—and this is
what it means to be no one and an Ego Machine at the same time. In
sum and on the level of phenomenology as well as on the level of neurobiology,
the conscious self is neither a form of knowledge nor an illusion.
It just is what it is.
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