Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2013
Thomas Metzinger
165 citations
Most conscious thought is actually automatic, non-agentive subpersonal processing, with personal-level cognition being the exception. Mind wandering can be understood as a loss of mental autonomy (M-autonomy), which people lack for roughly two thirds of their conscious lives. Empirical evidence from mind wandering and dreaming research shows that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly automatic and lacks mental agency, explicit goal-directedness, or veto control. This raises a new mind-body problem about how subpersonal cognition relates to personal-level thought. The paper proposes two criteria for individuating mind-wandering episodes: the 'self-representational blink' (SRB) and a shift in the phenomenological 'unit of identification' (UI), and outlines research goals linking mind wandering to philosophy of mind.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 24, 2020
Thomas Metzinger
133 citations
This paper proposes that the simplest form of conscious experience, termed "minimal phenomenal experience" (MPE), can be identified with the state of "pure awareness" reported in meditation. The authors derive six semantic constraints from existing literature and analyze sixteen phenomenological case studies to develop this concept. They hypothesize that pure awareness corresponds to a Bayesian predictive model of tonic alertness, which on an abstract level represents an unpartitioned epistemic space. This offers a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, grounding it in predictive processing theory.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Thomas Metzinger
84 citations
A metatheoretical paper identifies promising interdisciplinary links between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind, focusing on the MPS-problem—the challenge of isolating and empirically grounding the simplest form of self-consciousness, or minimal phenomenal selfhood. The authors argue that studying bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and full-body illusions can advance this goal. Additional research targets include refining the concept of a first-person perspective at a subcognitive level, exploring commonalities between mind-wandering and dreaming, comparing embodiment across dream and wake states, and showing that cognitive corruption and rationality deficits in dreams have more serious implications for epistemology and dream research methodology than usually assumed. The paper proposes a list of innovative research goals to strengthen connections between dream research and philosophy of mind.
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
February 18, 2025
Thomas Metzinger
6 citations
Thomas Metzinger argues that pure awareness—consciousness without subjective selfhood—is the simplest form of experience and a key to understanding consciousness scientifically. Drawing on over 500 narrative reports from meditators, he identifies phenomenal markers of minimal phenomenal experience, proposing that such states reveal the brain's self-model as a hallucination and that self-awareness is not essential to consciousness. Metzinger contends that the self is a fiction, a virtual model, and that pure awareness can occur without agency, body boundaries, or a knowing subject. The book integrates philosophy, neuroscience, and experiential data to advance a minimal model of consciousness, though the author's eliminative view of the self is critiqued as inconsistent with moral agency and religious perspectives.