39 Quotes by Thomas Metzinger

Thinking isn't something you do. Most of the time, it's something that happens to you.

The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.

Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our "reality tunnel.

The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.

The self is not a thing, but a process.

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.

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

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.

Subjective time flows forward, the phenomenal self is embedded into this flow, an inner history unfolds. That it is why it is not a bubble, but a tunnel: There is movement in time.