do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner
image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our
body and our psychological states but also our relationship to the past
and the future, as well as to other conscious beings. The internal image
of the person-as-a-whole is the phenomenal Ego, the “I” or “self” as it
appears in conscious experience; therefore, I use the terms “phenomenal
Ego” and “phenomenal self” interchangeably. The phenomenal Ego is
not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content
of an inner image—namely, the conscious self-model, or PSM. By placing
the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center
is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego. It is the origin of what
philosophers often call the first-person perspective. We are not in direct
contact with outside reality or with ourselves, but we do have an inner
perspective. We can use the word “I.” We live our conscious lives in the
Ego Tunnel.
In ordinary states of consciousness, there is always someone having
the experience—someone consciously experiencing himself as directed
toward the world, as a self in the act of attending, knowing, desiring,
willing, and acting. There are two major reasons for this. First, we possess
an integrated inner image of ourselves that is firmly anchored in our
feelings and bodily sensations; the world-simulation created by our
brains includes the experience of a point of view. Second, we are unable
to experience and introspectively recognize our self-models as models;
much of the self-model is, as philosophers might say, transparent.
Transparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium
through which information reaches us. We do not see the window but
only the bird flying by. We do not see neurons firing away in our brain
but only what they represent for us. A conscious world-model active in
the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it
is a model—we look right through it, directly onto the world, as it were.
The central claim of this book—and the theory behind it, the self-model
theory of subjectivity—is that the conscious experience of being a self
emerges because a large part of the PSM in your brain is transparent The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM at this moment
(your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories,
acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you
are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a
simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality—
and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image:
You—the physical person as a whole—look right through it. You do not
see it. But you see with it. The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning
your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others. Whenever
the organism needs this tool, the brain activates a PSM. If—as, for instance,
in dreamless deep sleep—the tool is not needed anymore, it is
turned off.
It must be emphasized that although our brains create the Ego Tunnel,
no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there
is no little man running things inside our head. The Ego and the Tunnel
are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical selforganization
on many levels. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological
data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information
about the world by letting it appear as if it were an Ego’s knowledge. But
no such things as selves exist in the world. A biological organism, as
such, is not a self. An Ego is not a self, either, but merely a form of representational
content—namely, the content of a transparent self-model activated
in the organism’s brain.
Variations of this tunnel metaphor illustrate other new ideas in mind
science: What would it mean for an Ego Tunnel to branch out to include
other Ego Tunnels? What happens to the Ego Tunnel during the dream
state? Can machines possess an artificial form of self-consciousness, and
can they develop a proper Ego Tunnel? How do empathy and social
cognition work; how can communication take place from one tunnel to
the next? Finally, of course, we must ask: Is it possible to leave the Ego
Tunnel?
The idea of an Ego Tunnel is based on an older notion that has been
around for quite some time now. It is the concept of a “reality tunnel,”
which can be found in research on virtual reality and the programming
of advanced video games, or in the popular work of nonacademic philosophers such as Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. The
general idea is this: Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an
objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply
unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct
our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel.” We are
never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent
us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory
systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from
our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions.
The construction process is largely invisible; in the end, we
see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see, and most of us are
completely unaware of this fact.
From a philosopher’s point of view, there is a lot of nonsense in this
popular notion. We don’t create an individual world but only a worldmodel.
Moreover, the whole idea of potentially being directly in touch
with reality is a sort of romantic folklore; we know the world only by using
representations, because (correctly) representing something is what
knowing is. Also, the Ego Tunnel is not about what psychologists call
“confirmation bias”—that is, our tendency to notice and assign significance
to observations that confirm our beliefs and expectations, while
filtering out or rationalizing away observations that do not. Nor is it true
that we can never get out of the tunnel or know anything about the outside
world: Knowledge is possible, for instance, through the cooperation
and communication of large groups of people—scientific communities
that design and test theories, constantly criticize one another, and exchange
empirical data and new hypotheses. Finally, the popular notion
of a reality tunnel is playfully used in simply too many ways and contexts
and therefore remains hopelessly vague.
In the first chapter, I confine discussion to the phenomenon of conscious
experience and develop a better and richer understanding of why
exactly it is exclusively internal. One question to be addressed is, How
can all this take place inside the brain and at the same time create the
robust experience of living in a reality that is experienced as an external
reality? We want to understand how what Finnish philosopher and neuroscientist
Antti Revonsuo calls an “out-of-brain experience” is possible: the experience you have all the time—for instance, right now, as you are
reading this book. The robust experience of not being in a tunnel, of being
directly and immediately in touch with external reality, is one of the
most remarkable features of human consciousness. You even have it
during an out-of-body experience.
To confine oneself to studying consciousness as such means to consider
the phenomenal content of one’s mental representations—that is,
how they feel to you from the first-person perspective, what it is like
(subjectively, privately, inwardly) to have them. For example, the predominant
phenomenal content of seeing a red rose is the quality of redness
itself. In the conscious experience of smelling a mixture of amber
and sandalwood, the phenomenal content is that raw subjective quality
of “amber-ness” and “sandalwood-ness,” ineffable and apparently simple.
In experiencing an emotion—say, feeling happy and relaxed—the phenomenal
content is the feeling itself and not whatever it refers to.
All evidence now points to the conclusion that phenomenal content
is determined locally, not by the environment at all but by internal
properties of the brain only. Moreover, the relevant properties are the
same regardless of whether the red rose is there in front of you or
merely imagined or dreamed about. The subjective sandalwood-andamber
experience doesn’t require incense, it doesn’t even require a
nose; in principle it can also be elicited by stimulating the right combination
of glomeruli in your olfactory bulb. Glomeruli (there are some
two thousand of them) take input from one type or another of your olfactory
receptor cells. If the unified sensory quality of smelling sandalwood
and amber typically involves activating smell receptor cells of
type 18, 93, 143, and 211 in your nose, then we would expect to get the
same conscious experience—an identical odor—by stimulating the corresponding
glomeruli with an electrode. The question is, What is the
minimally sufficient set of neural properties? Could we selectively elicit
exactly the same phenomenon by doing even less, possibly at another
location in the brain? Most neuroscientists, and probably the majority
of philosophers as well, would answer yes: Activate the minimal neural
correlate of a given conscious experience and you get the conscious experience
itself.
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