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Thomas Metzinger Biography

Thomas Metzinger

Thomas Metzinger (born 12 March 1958) is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. As of 2011[update], he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2008 to 2009 he served as a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study; from 2014 to 2019 he is a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College.

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Thomas Metzinger Quotes

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.

Self Esteem, Mind, Behaviour, Phenomenologist, Stimuli

The self is not a thing, but a process.

Process, Self, Thing

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.

Aim, Appear, Creating, Real, Self, Subjective

Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

Clarity, Horkheimer, Saws, School, Self

All attention is introspection.

Attention, Introspection

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

Thinking, Silence, Able, Clearly, Contact

One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust "out-of-the brain experience", a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.

Brain, Characteristics, Ego, Interesting, Internal, Tunnels

Conscious experience as such is an exclusively internal affair: Once all functional properties of your brain are fixed, the character of subjective experience is determined as well.

Character, Brain, Determined, Experience, Exclusively, Properties

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.

Ego, Looks, Mental, Person, Persons, Whole

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.

Air, Distance, Dolphins, Energy, Jumping, Longer

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.

Attempting, Chocolate, Currently, Imagine, Vision, Writing

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

Facts, Presenting, Subjectivity, Use

I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

Fundamentals, Firsts, Fundamental, Understand, Embark, Having

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".

Mean, Notion, Notions, Think, Thinking, Trying

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.

Availability, Contents, Mental, Order, Principles, Property

Retribution is really a stone age concept.

Age, Concept, Retribution, Stone, Stones

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

Body, Brain, Information Processing, Objects, Past, Speaking

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.

Believe, Self, Feelings, Spatial, Permanent, Balance

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

Communicate, Flow, Humans, Outer, Unable, Words

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.

Actually, Cheating, Emotional, Maybe, Phenomenology, Reality

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