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zisi's review against another edition
5.0
Metzinger, a scientist and Buddhist practitioner, brings clarity and insight to the topic of ego/brain/consciousness. Highly recommended.
miklosha's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this book up after hearing Thomas Metzinger on Waking Up with Sam Harris. I have some understanding of consciousness research, but consider myself a layman.
The Ego Tunnel is largely a theory on how consciousness is constructed through our sensory experiences, with other explorations of lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, and experiences born out of psychoactive drug use. The Tunnel is itself a construction of our own first person experiences, preventing any actual contact with our objective environment. He speaks to at length the slipperiness of the self and how it can be distorted in many of the above mentioned examples.
Metzinger is a philosopher but relies on neurological research to bolster his claims. This has the benefit of a interdisciplinary perspective on consciousness research. However, for the lay reader (myself included), The Ego Tunnel can be compehensive and can be quite dense at times. Take your time.
The Ego Tunnel is largely a theory on how consciousness is constructed through our sensory experiences, with other explorations of lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, and experiences born out of psychoactive drug use. The Tunnel is itself a construction of our own first person experiences, preventing any actual contact with our objective environment. He speaks to at length the slipperiness of the self and how it can be distorted in many of the above mentioned examples.
Metzinger is a philosopher but relies on neurological research to bolster his claims. This has the benefit of a interdisciplinary perspective on consciousness research. However, for the lay reader (myself included), The Ego Tunnel can be compehensive and can be quite dense at times. Take your time.
rpmiller's review against another edition
4.0
This is a book for the layman, although it is quite deep. The tunnel metaphor is not great, but the sense of it grows on you. A couple of new abnormal psychologies were presented to fill out the underlying evidence to support Metzinger's theorem including "alien hand syndrome" (consider the movie Dr Strangelove). He provides an excellent description of how synchronized oscillatory discharges of neurons might produce a binding of distributed brain processes. He discusses evidence that tool use is supported by integrating the tool into the self model. He mentioned that Brocca's area of the brain is not only associated with language, but also represents the hand. Plenty more along those lines. There is significant discussion of moral and ethical issues in research related to consciousness, including pharmacology, neuroscience and AI. Much of the work advances the self model theory he introduced in Being No One.
sylvia_flora's review against another edition
5.0
Not only a guidebook to Lucid Dreaming, Metzinger's extant neurological citations are mingled with rich anecdotes of his own consciousness. Towards the end, I got a psychedelic, or almost Leary vibe, but it was coupled well enough with the neuroscience research to make a compelling case that, yes, human consciousnesses are connected, but we all live in our own tunnels of consciousness. And, yeah, that some natural, or synthetic substances, can enhance what we experience consciously. Because, science. I don't advocate substance use, but I do think research must be allowed and encouraged by scientists. That aside, I also liked that Metzinger is a firm supporter of meditation. Is he right? Read, and you tell me.
mobilisinmobili's review against another edition
3.0
Quite enjoyable, although sometimes it felt like I was reading 5 different books at once.
ksotala's review against another edition
4.0
Nice discussion of Metzinger's theory of consciousness. His basic claim is that what humans tend to think of as a "self" is what he calls a "phenomenal self-model" (PSM). As the name suggests, the PSM is the brain's model of the organism as a whole, and includes things such as a model of the organism's body. The PSM is situated within a broader world-model of the environment that the organism exists in. Metzinger claims that the reason why we experience there being thing such as "selves" is that there has been no evolutionary advantage in seeing the PSM as a model - we do not see the sophisticated computational machinery which produces it, and thus experience it as something self-contained and essential, rather as something that's constructed from parts for the sake of enabling better information-processing.
Metzinger's book discusses a number of experiments as well as details of what our conscious experience is like and what the reasons for that might be.
For example, humans perceive time as a kind of eternal present: everything we experience is experienced as happening "now", and even when we recall a memory of the past or think of the future, it is experienced as us remembering or planning something right now. But one could imagine a mind that didn't have any conception of an immediate privileged now. Metzinger doesn't go into detail of how this kind of a different mind would represent time, but personally I could speculate it as having just mental representations of events with different timestamps, with increasingly broad probability distributions on those events that had not yet been witnessed but which were extrapolated to happen, or of which sufficient time had passed that the memories might be becoming uncertain...
Metzinger suggests that the experience of a unified now emerges from the need to take quick action in response to threatening situations in the environment, and to provide all of the subsystems in the brain with a shared temporal frame of reference:
Metzinger also suggests that this sense of a Now is part of what enables consciousness as we understand it: experiencing ourselves as being embedded in a constantly-developing Now is a fundamental part of human experience and consciousness.
The weakest part of the book is the last third, where the topic suddenly switches into that of ethics. The discussion in this section seems quite disconnected from that of the previous sections, and Metzinger starts talking about issues such as national drug policies and whether meditation should be taught in schools. A part of this discussion is justifiable as it touches upon the question of the effects that an increased understanding of consciousness research will have on society, but the whole discussion mostly comes off as superficial and not very well-argued. (Though I will admit that I started skimming this section pretty quickly.)
Nonetheless, overall Metzinger paints a very interesting picture of his theory of how the brain might work, though there's still a definite speculative vibe around it all.
Metzinger's book discusses a number of experiments as well as details of what our conscious experience is like and what the reasons for that might be.
For example, humans perceive time as a kind of eternal present: everything we experience is experienced as happening "now", and even when we recall a memory of the past or think of the future, it is experienced as us remembering or planning something right now. But one could imagine a mind that didn't have any conception of an immediate privileged now. Metzinger doesn't go into detail of how this kind of a different mind would represent time, but personally I could speculate it as having just mental representations of events with different timestamps, with increasingly broad probability distributions on those events that had not yet been witnessed but which were extrapolated to happen, or of which sufficient time had passed that the memories might be becoming uncertain...
Metzinger suggests that the experience of a unified now emerges from the need to take quick action in response to threatening situations in the environment, and to provide all of the subsystems in the brain with a shared temporal frame of reference:
Although, strictly speaking, no such thing as Now exists in the outside world, it proved adaptive to organize the inner model of the world around such a Now - creating a common temporal frame of reference for all the mechanisms in the brain so that they can access the same information at the same time. A certain point in time had to be represented in a privileged manner in order to be flagged as reality.
Metzinger also suggests that this sense of a Now is part of what enables consciousness as we understand it: experiencing ourselves as being embedded in a constantly-developing Now is a fundamental part of human experience and consciousness.
The weakest part of the book is the last third, where the topic suddenly switches into that of ethics. The discussion in this section seems quite disconnected from that of the previous sections, and Metzinger starts talking about issues such as national drug policies and whether meditation should be taught in schools. A part of this discussion is justifiable as it touches upon the question of the effects that an increased understanding of consciousness research will have on society, but the whole discussion mostly comes off as superficial and not very well-argued. (Though I will admit that I started skimming this section pretty quickly.)
Nonetheless, overall Metzinger paints a very interesting picture of his theory of how the brain might work, though there's still a definite speculative vibe around it all.
rball's review
4.0
A philosopher of Metzinger's skill grappling with issues that are traditionally the province of mystics (who are typically poor writers) is a big fucking deal. I could have done without the last fifth or so, because I don't personally find speculation interesting, but judging by its presence in many nonfiction books, I seem to be in the minority.
will_sargent's review
3.0
Honestly, I don't know whether it's from reading way too many neuroscience books or just reading too many philosophy books, but there was nothing I felt was added to my experience from reading this book. It's a discussion of consciousness from a philosophical perspective that takes the neuroscience into account -- but having taken the neuroscience into account, there's little left to do besides document it and equate it to the "internal" experience. This is unproductive in itself, because the nature of the illusion is that it feels real, even when it is provably a neural correlate to the outside reality.
Where the book did become unexpectedly fascinating was in its discussion of the validity of consciousness to an Artifical Intelligence -- silicon based consciousness is as "valid" as carbon based consciousness, there are any number of ethical questions involved in what can "legally" be done to them.
That being said, this is a solid book that is arguably much broader than "The User Illusion" or "The New Executive Brain", and is done from a philosophical perspective that may be much easier to digest.
Where the book did become unexpectedly fascinating was in its discussion of the validity of consciousness to an Artifical Intelligence -- silicon based consciousness is as "valid" as carbon based consciousness, there are any number of ethical questions involved in what can "legally" be done to them.
That being said, this is a solid book that is arguably much broader than "The User Illusion" or "The New Executive Brain", and is done from a philosophical perspective that may be much easier to digest.
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