Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
February 18, 2025
Thomas Metzinger
6 citations
THE ELEPHANT AND THE BLIND: The Experience of Pure Consciousness--Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports by Thomas Metzinger. MIT Press, 2024. 648 pages. Paperback; $80.00. ISBN: 9780262547109. *What is consciousness and how can science fruitfully study it? In this book, Thomas Metzinger proposes that the experience of pure awareness occurs without "subjectivity" and will help...
Philosophical Perspectives on Psychedelic Psychiatry
September 13, 2024
Thomas Metzinger
Abstract The ‘enculturation problem’ is the problem of how to integrate the psychedelic experience into culture and societal practice, in a way that is rational, evidence-based, and ethically convincing. In a first-order approximation, the enculturation problem can be framed as a problem for applied ethics and policy-making: How can the psychedelic experience be culturally integrated in a way...
PLoS One
2021
Alex Gamma, Thomas Metzinger
To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of "pure awareness" experiences in meditators. An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 24, 2020
Thomas Metzinger
133 citations
This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints...
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
2018
Thomas Metzinger
This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, "Bayesian" and social...
Cognitive Neuroscience
April 3, 2014
Thomas Metzinger
39 citations
Seth develops a convincing and detailed internalist alternative to the sensorimotor-contingency theory of perceptual phenomenology. However, there are remaining conceptual problems due to a semantic ambiguity in the notion of "presence" and the idea of "subjective veridicality." The current model should be integrated with the earlier idea that experiential "realness" and "mind-independence" are...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Thomas Metzinger
165 citations
This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call "conscious thought" is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Thomas Metzinger
84 citations
This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of "minimal phenomenal selfhood," which refers...
Science (New York, N.Y.)
August 24, 2007
Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger et al.
Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading to a striking disturbance of bodily self-consciousness. On the basis of these clinical data, we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt...
The MIT Press eBooks
August 28, 2000
Thomas Metzinger
73 citations
Abstract. Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its ba-sic...