Any of you anons read Thomas Metzinger...

Any of you anons read Thomas Metzinger? This is what Metzinger roughly says about what neuroscience has to say about existence of self (written by user in another thread which insipired me to read him)

>self just a model its not an entity or a substance. it disappears constantly, is automatic, is ephemeral, it has no clear horizons or dimensions. its contents are not continuous or even remotely relevant to what the brain is actually doing, even when concerned with activities like information procession, problem solving, subvocal speech, its all disconnected from any sense of interiority or self which is in and of itself illusory. You aren’t even a witness to what’s happening, you’re just not there at all. Decisions happen many milliseconds before you feel you’ve made them, you also have literally no control over your motor functions or appetites. there’s just nothing going on there that resembles an agent. lots of modular, networked together subsystems that resonate and intermingle but no consistent process we could call selfhood. its worse than you think.

Currently reading Ego Tunnel and loving it.

>The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self. We see the signal of consciousness in a gleaming eye and imagine some ethereal space beneath the vault of the skull, lit by shifting patterns of feeling and thought, charged with intention. An essence. But what do we find in that space behind the face, when we look? The brute fact is there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain…You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There’s no one there.
What did he mean by this?

>Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self.
>One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings.
This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

I guess it is sort of a warning I'm not a big thinker though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Parts of these remind me of Edmund Husserl's grievance with Descartes in Crisis of European Science.

I'm enjoying these small passages. Thanks for alerting me to the existence of this writer.

Reading him changed the way I look at people and myself (Being No One/Ego Tunnel), for better or for worse.. glad you enjoyed the passages.

Kind of lowkey writer, I stumbled on him accidentally in a Veeky Forums thread few days back.

>Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
> The Quadruple Object
was recommended by someone against/critiquing Metzinger when I checked the archive for the pasta in my OP. I haven't read them myself yet, but they seem interesting.

Thomas Ligotti uses Metzinger in Conspiracy against the Human Race.

>Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
>When I believed the Non-Reductionist View, I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.
- Derek Parfit on a similar subject

BUt who decided to write this book?

“Um, well....uhhh..”
*Sweats profusely whilst fumbling to give you an answer*

Why is there a "(You)" behind the number in your post? Are you implying there exists anyone you're replying to?

Who are you asking?

>you
Who?

>Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention.
>Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways.
>There will later be some memories about my life.
>And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice.
>My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations.
>This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me.
>Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.

If you enjoy this or find it interesting I would recommend Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. To her human action causes processes that influence things to world's end long after the originating point is gone, essentially bringing to my intuition how you are just an action-process going on about the world and causing different action-processes to start. She writes a lot about this, pretty much the entire Human Condition could be seen to be about this.

...

Metzinger is kinda obtuse, just like Sam Harris. No surprise they're both into Drumpf-posting as well.

If you want a decent critique read "The problem with Metzinger".

Also none of this (the problem of the self/mind) is revolutionary from a philosophical perspective, we now just have more scientific data to back it up.

That's not very teasing at all to someone with a background in complex systems. He is giving a far too embellished view of emergence. Emergent phenomena should become a high school class rather sooner than later so people can clear up so many confusions about neuroscience's and physics' views of conscience. The book is good introduction but the pessimism detracts from the meat of the theory.

>it disappears constantly, is automatic, is ephemeral, it has no clear horizons or dimensions.[...]

As emergent phenomenon, conscience/self relies on the organization of its individual agents, yet the collective effective may or may not be ephemeral. It is ephemeral in restrict wording but it's actually quasi-persistent when you consider the succession of states is smooth, i.e, the difference between any two states that are immediately followed by one another, is rather small. The approximation is important because it's the difference between a short memory loss patient that can't link one state to the other and everyone else that have, as he put it, illusion of self (calling it an illusion does nothing to put it into a different status than it already is though, he's merely being materialist about it).

>Decisions happen many milliseconds before you feel you’ve made them, you also have literally no control over your motor functions or appetites. there’s just nothing going on there that resembles an agent.[...]

In light of the emergence paradigm, this is both obvious and mundane. The underground networks in an ant nest are an emergent phenomena built by the pheromone/smell relation of the queen and the other ants, but we do not claim the nest is doing roads by itself. What we do claim, is that the ant nest is a thing in its own, that has its own name, and its own properties that no worker ant neither the queen has. Likewise, a neuron cell does nothing that the human does, yet many cells do, there is nothing disenchanting about this because it makes 'us' abstract entities that result from very, very complex schema of individually simplistic/dumb agents.

Essentialism has been since long fought back to non-relevance, so I don't know what he is talking about in that passage. It shouldn't have followed from the fact that brains are nothing special that there is no afterlife, that should have come before really. Like I said to OP, I believe the root of disenchanting is the lack of education about how intricate and just how truly complex we are as phenomena. The simple fact that we cannot be treated as single elements but as the abstract part of a complex network that is "modular, networked together subsystems that resonate and intermingle but no consistent process we could call selfhood" with the added "perceived selfhood", should be the wet dream of most metaphysics. And this lack of consistency is even overestimated by him, as I said, conscience is quasi-persistent during most of the day.

>tfw Sam Harris tier writer impressed me.
I should get a rope and chair lads..
Could you give me some reading recommendations for emergent phenomena, other than Wikipage.

I wonder how much money satan pumped into this demonic manifesto

does satan have a self?

>Decisions happen many milliseconds before you feel you’ve made them, you also have literally no control over your motor functions or appetites.

this guy loves
LOVES MRI studies and thinks now that this WONDERFUL technology is being used we can offically talk about brain states.
becuase as we all know
BLOOD FLOW IS THE BE ALL END ALL OF BRAIN ACTIVITY

i really hate how willing people are to trust technology
this is the example par excellence.

him and sam harris both need to be put through an mri machine while holding a bunch of rusty nails.

>BLOOD FLOW IS THE BE ALL END ALL OF BRAIN ACTIVITY

Try to have brain activity without blood flow.
I dare you.

>user one explicitly states that while blood flow may be necessary to brain activity, that does not mean it is sufficient or exhaustive to what brain activity is
>user two tries to write a "gotcha" by saying blood flow is necessary to brain activity

Not a lot of brain activity in your head user two, HAHAHAHAHAHA XXXDDDDD

>taking a funpost this seriously
Calm down user. Breathe in, hold, breathe out, 4 second rhythm on each stage.

why are the words in your screenshot colour coded?

interesting, I always wondered why deleuze was into neuroscience but it makes sense now

I'm a brainlet and I need this.

You missed the joke, sweetheart.

no u

>'us' abstract entities
Quoting Andy Clark, Metzinger calls the self model a weapon from our evolution. It has nothing to do with this "greater than the sum of its parts" aristotelian mereological garbage, it is lesser, and about as abstract as a protein synthetized by a cell.
>Could you give me some reading recommendations for emergent phenomena, other than Wikipage.
Keep reading Metzinger as he talks emergence. Read Supersizing the Mind from Andy Clark, too, read the appendix first, then the intro, then the rest.
>who
>decided
Slow with the uptake?

Thanks for the recommendation.

you're welcome!

Granted, it does not matter if we call it greater than the sum of its part or lesser than the sum of its part, and doesn't matter whether not we call it abstract, since the relations among parts are non linear and can't be built from a linear sum anyway. We can safely retract the part about abstract entities while retaining the definition of something collective with properties not derived from the parts by summing. When I call this abstract I do so in the same manner I call the magnetic field abstract, purely due to the fact I can only measure its effects, not directly. This is a vice of language and dropping the terminology derived from mereology is fine by me.

I also agree on recommending Andy Clark, as I think he does a better job than Metzinger in not sounding like someone who wants to smear the sad truth of reality in your face every 2 paragraphs.

>common man
self is real

>educated man
self is an illusion

>enlightened man
self is real

don't @ me