Latest Thomas Metzinger Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Flow, Communicate, Humans

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Thinking, Silence, Able

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little "Think me!" and our mind begins to wander.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Single Mom, Thinking, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Self Esteem, Mind, Behaviour

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Writing, Chocolate, Vision

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans, avoid risks, and treat our fellow human beings fairly - for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern ourselves.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Believe, Long, Risk

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• As far as inner action is concerned, we are only rarely truly self-determined persons, for the major part of our conscious mental activity rather is an automatic, unintentional form of behavior on the subpersonal level.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Self, Levels, Action

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mind, Body, Spontaneous

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Distance, Jumping, Air

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Levels, Action, Veto

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• All attention is introspection.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Attention, Introspection

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• I believe that gut feelings, the sense of balance, and spatial self-perception are so firmly coupled to our biological body that we will never be able to leave it experientially on a permanent basis.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Believe, Self, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Space, Evidence, Phenomenal

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Order, Availability, Attention

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• For a human being, to possess a consciously experienced first-person perspective means to have acquired a very specific functional profile and distinctive level of representational content in one's currently active phenomenal self-model: It has, episodically, become a dynamic inner model of a knowing self.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mean, Self, Knowing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mean, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Use, Subjectivity, Facts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Perspective, Firsts, Consciousness

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Mean, Subjectivity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• In ordinary life, the phenomenology of embodied emotions is an excellent example for dynamic changes between transparency and opacity: You can "directly perceive" that your wife is cheating you, or you can become aware of the possibility that maybe it is you who has a problem, that your "immediate" emotional representation of social reality might actually be a misrepresentation.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Cheating, Reality, Emotional

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• I believe that if we would carefully apply the distinction between transparency and opacity to the different layers of the human self-model, looking at self-consciousness in a much more careful and fine-grained manner, then we might also arrive at a new answer to your original question: What a "first-person perspective" really is.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Believe, Self, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• What many people don't see is that there are abundant examples of phenomenal opacity: It is one of the most interesting features of the human conscious model of reality that, first, it can contain elements that are not experienced as mind-independent, as unequivocally real, as immediately given, and second, that there is a "gradient of realness" in which one and the same content can be experienced transparently or in an opaque fashion.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Fashion, Real, Independent

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Religious, Believe, Phenomenology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Virtual reality is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible - ideally, by creating a subjective sense of "presence" and full immersion in the user.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Real, Self, Creating

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Running, Philosophical, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com