Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2: 395–398, 2003. BOOK REVIEW

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Book review You are not what you feel you are Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, 2003, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0262134179, 584 pages.

You are no one! Obviously, this claim contradicts each one of your experiences. At the end of Thomas Metzinger’s book, you will still feel yourself as being someone, but you will understand that you are no one. In that sense, you will be closer to yourself than before. But Metzinger not only challenges folk psychology. His “Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity” (SMT) also explicitly questions traditional philosophy of mind’s positions on self-consciousness and subjectivity. One amazing feat is that the discourse detailing this original and counterintuitive position is never polemical. Rather, Metzinger’s theory answers questions left unresolved by more common and intuitive theoretical positions. It also integrates them by describing their roots as coming from the structure of the conscious mind as explained by his own theory. One force of Metzinger’s position is to make clear and operational the “obvious distinction between phenomenal and epistemically justified content” (p. 284). He indeed denounces the “phenomenal fallacy” that fuels lots of traditional views which conclude from the content of phenomenal experience of selfhood to literal properties of what the self is. Contrary to these views, Metzinger always fully respects the specificity of phenomenal experience and manages to explain why you experience yourself as being someone while you are no one. With this position, Metzinger turns his back on Cartesian “epistemic transparency,” following which one cannot be wrong about the content of one’s own consciousness. Rather, we are caught in a permanent “naïve-realistic selfmisunderstanding” – we wrongly believe we are someone. When he claims that the self does not exist, Metzinger means that what we experience as ourselves is not a process-independent individual entity, continuous and invariant. But Metzinger’s position is in no way restricted to this negative stance. Quite the contrary, his position intends to be constructive, in that it explains which reality our experience of ourselves corresponds to: what we call “the self” is nothing else than the content of a self-representational

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process. However, this representational nature of “the self” is hidden to ourselves, as a blind spot structurally anchored in self-consciousness: it is “transparent” to ourselves. This principle of “phenomenal transparency” is the most decisive characteristic of phenomenal experience and means that the earlier processing stages are unavailable for introspection. It implies that the selfrepresentation is not recognized as such by the system activating it within itself. It is like a window that we do not see but through which we look, or, more specifically, it is as looking at a mirror: we do not see the mirror, but just ourselves. This is the heart of Metzinger’s theory: what we call “the self” is only a “Phenomenal Self Model” (PSM), the content of which corresponds to all those properties of yourself to which you can presently direct your attention. Moreover, by a second concept, the “Phenomenal Model of Intentionality Relation” (PMIR), Metzinger introduces the idea that this phenomenal “self” is always embedded in a phenomenal “world,” the subject being oriented toward objects. Metzinger details his view and provides us with a real recipe for phenomenal experience. He lists eleven constraints, each at several levels of investigation: phenomenological, representationalist, informational-computational, functional and physical-neurobiological. His investigation is indeed interdisciplinary from the very beginning. His first aim is not to maximize conceptual precision within one single discipline, as philosophy usually does, but rather to make interdisciplinary work possible in developing suitable operational tools. It is in this framework that Metzinger defines minimal consciousness as corresponding to the “presence of a world.” This experience of a world corresponds to a transparent representation of it, whose content is globally available for attention, action and/or cognition. It is only in adding a further constraint, perspectivalness, that we can talk about subjective consciousness. He summarizes the “Self-model theory of subjectivity” as follows: “phenomenally subjective experience consists in transparently modeling the intentionality relation within a global, coherent model of the world embedded in a virtual window of presence” (p. 427). This summary, however, does not tell the whole story. To further understand what Metzinger means when he claims that the self does not exist, one has also to look closer at another constraint: the ability of “offline activation.” This is where the notion of simulation comes in. This notion is central in Metzinger’s theory because he considers representation as a special case of simulation. Indeed, because we are never in direct epistemic contact with the world, every representation is a simulation. As well, every self-representation is a self-simulation, because its content never corresponds strictly to the cur-

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rent state of the system. To quote Metzinger: “A fruitful way of looking at the human brain is as a system which, even in the ordinary waking states, constantly hallucinates at the world, as a system that constantly lets its internal autonomous simulational dynamics collide with the ongoing flow of sensory input, vigorously dreaming at the world and thereby generating the content of phenomenal experience” (p. 52). It follows from this that one misrepresents oneself in at least two fundamental and unavoidable ways. First, the representational nature of the “self” is not available to introspection, and thus is not part of your phenomenal experience. Second, the content itself of this representation of yourself is never accurate in that it never corresponds to your actual state. You continuously hallucinate yourself and the world you live in. Metzinger reinforces his theory by testing its explanatory power through confrontation with neuropsychological studies. In two detailed chapters, Metzinger shows how a closer inspection of border-line cases can reveal implicit assumptions and conceptual deficits. A large number of astonishing neuro-psycho-pathological or non-common phenomenal experiences, from agnosia to Cotard syndrome, including lucid dreams, are explained using the same conceptual framework: the one offered by the PSM and the PMIR. Surely, this proves the power of the proposed theory. However, some questions arise. First, if the self is a self-representation, how is a self-representation possible, as opposed to a non-self-representation? One element of the answer is given by the differentiation between reflexive and mereological relation. But how does the system make the difference between self-related and world-related information? This looks like “only” an empirical question, which, moreover, is already partly resolved. But the question really at stake here is: can we talk about self-representation without presupposing a self, and the ability for the self to recognize itself? In any case, even if a self has to be presupposed, it is surely not the self as depicted by traditional philosophy and folk psychology. Second question, if self-related information is globally available systemrelated information, why talk about a self-representation and not merely about a system-representation? Here, Metzinger’s answer is explicit and based on the fundamental notion of phenomenal transparency. A recurrent formulation of this question in traditional philosophy amounts to a demand to explain the transition from the non-conscious representation to the phenomenal experience of selfhood. Metzinger reverses the perspective: it is precisely because the whole-system-representation remains transparent that the corresponding phenomenal experience of selfhood arises and that it becomes relevant to talk about a self-representation.

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A third question for Metzinger’s thesis is the following: can we believe that the self does not exist? Intuitively, obviously not, and Metzinger anticipates this. But is the non-existence of the self a necessary consequence of Metzinger’s theory? Even if the “self” as described by traditional philosophers does not exist, the physical system representing and represented does exist. Metzinger agrees and relates this necessary existence assumption to a “naturalist variant of the Cartesian cogito” (p. 278). At this point of the discussion, though, two positions remain possible. First, one can claim, as Metzinger does, that the self is only a fictional self-representation. However, another possible choice would have been to argue that the system able to represent itself is nothing other than a self. Indeed, any system, be it representational or not, can be said to be a self if ever it presents the basic characteristics of singularity, individuality, and, most importantly, autonomy. Self-organised systems, as basic as single-cell organisms, present these properties, and thus can be said to be selves in this peculiar sense. Thus, depending on its organisation, a system able to represent itself would also be a good candidate to be a self on this description. Among the authors who provide arguments following this line of thought are, most notably, H. Jonas, H. Maturana, F. Varela, and E. Morin. These two options, the one just described briefly, and Metzinger’s, may not be so different, as they both claim that the self as it is represented and experienced is not the self as it is in reality. Both views conclude that the view promoted by traditional philosophy and folk psychology is misleading. The advantage of the second view is that it enlarges the discussion about the self. In this framework, the self-representation reveals the existence of a self, even if what it is really remains unavailable phenomenologically. This view promises to be all the more constructive for one promoting an interdisciplinary investigation of the self, as Metzinger proposes to do. In the end, the length of this book should not restrain any reader who is interested to know more about his/her own experience of himself/herself. Indeed, it renders accessible a technical and detailed discourse. Even though you may have the impression of repetition at several points, you will also have the feeling that you are penetrating the “flesh” of this book, and gaining some insight into some reality of your self, both at an epistemic and phenomenological level. Dorothée Legrand CEPERC – Département de Philosophie Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence Cedex, France E-mail: [email protected]