Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity

"Well the first thing to say here is that this is a big book, both in terms of sheer size—and in the density of ideas on each page. Thomas Metzinger is a German analytic philosopher, and one of my most important mentors and inspirations over the years. Like Dennett, he trained in rigorous philosophy and combined this training with an enviable neuroscientific literacy. He’s one of the pioneers who crossed over from pure philosophy into the Wild West of interdisciplinary research. I first encountered Metzinger in 2005, in Iceland, where we were both giving talks, and we had a really fascinating and, for me, very illuminating conversation. Starting with this conversation, and going on to read his work, Metzinger inspired me to think much more closely about ‘the self.’ Until then, I’d mainly been thinking about consciousness in general and about perceptual experiences of the world. There has been a strong bias in consciousness research to study visual experience—partly because the neural correlates approach can be readily applied in this domain. But of course consciousness is much more than just visual experience. I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation that the experience of ‘being a self’ is not a precondition for consciousness. At the level of self as personal identity, I think this is very likely true. But the experiences of selfhood are nonetheless a central aspect of consciousness as it unfolds for us humans and probably for other animals, too. At some very basic levels, it might be that self-related experiences are foundational to all of consciousness—an idea that I explore in my own book, Being You . Yes, unpacking what ‘self’ means is one of the reasons Metzinger’s book is on this list. My own book follows a similar trajectory. It starts off by talking about consciousness in general, but really where I’m going, what my motivation is, is to unravel what it means to be a self: Being You , being me, Being No One . My debt to Metzinger is obvious even in the title. Many of the ideas within it are continuous with what he was saying nearly 20 years ago. Indeed, they go back at least as far as David Hume. In the 18th century, Hume proposed the idea of a ‘bundle theory’ of self. This is an anti-essentialist view of self, according to which there is no immutable, persistent, stable, single, perhaps even incorporeal essence of me or you. Rather, the self is a bundle of perceptions. The self is not the thing that does the perceiving, the self is a perception too; more specifically, it’s a collection of perceptions that are experienced as a unified whole in normal circumstances—when you’re not neurologically damaged, or psychiatrically ill, or in one of our lab’s experiments. There are many different and potentially separable aspects to the overall experience of being a self. Over time and in the moment, too. Here, things get interestingly complex. At any given moment, there is the experience that the self is unified—that it is ‘all of a piece’, the essence of you. But of course the way things seem doesn’t mean that’s the way they are, and experiences of selfhood can come apart in all sorts of ways. Here I can mention the much loved books of Oliver Sacks. His case studies provide beautiful insights into how experiences of self and consciousness can break down and fractionate in ways that don’t seem apparent or even possible, unless or until they’ve actually happened. Then there’s the stability of self over time—a sort of experiential temporal unity. This is something I go into in my book a bit more than these other books I reference—this sense of being the same person. I draw an analogy with the phenomenon of change blindness, which many people are familiar with in the context of visual perception. If a visual scene changes very, very slowly, and if you’re not focusing on the part that is changing, then you don’t experience the change at all. It seems like it’s a continuous, stable, conscious experience. Change of perception is not the same as perception of change. I think the same thing applies, in buckets, to experiences of being a continuous self. That is, I think there is a form of self-change blindness by which we perceive ourselves as changing less than we actually do, as being more stable and continuous over time than we actually are. And, further, that there are good reasons why things work that way in terms of the functions of self-related experiences in controlling and regulating the body. Of course, these days, with photographs and video, we now have all sorts of ways of recognizing that self-change does happens more than it might seem to. Let me get back to the question of what a self is, and to the basic premise that the self is not a single thing. I can unpack that a little more. The self is a collection of perceptions. There are low-level perceptions and experiences of being a body and being identified with this object in the world that is my body. There is the experience of having a first-person perspective on the world from which I seem to observe the world. There are experiences of agency and volition: I can experience myself as being the cause of actions, and as intending to do things. Then, building on top of this, finally comes the ‘I’—the sense of being a continuous individual over time with a name, an identity, and a set of memories, which are in turn shaped and sharpened by all sorts of cultural and social resonances. All these things are aspects of being a self. This, anyway, is how I’ve come to think of the self, and it was all sparked by reading Metzinger’s book. In my own book I go further into this, and develop these ideas from a more neuroscientific and prediction engine perspective (Metzinger was writing before predictive processing was a thing), but his book was the key starting point. It is true that this book is ridiculously long, weighing in at 700 pages or so of dense philosophy. Metzinger has often said, in a self-deprecating, Germanic humour kind of way, that he regrets writing it, because its length might have put off many readers. In academic philosophy apparently there is a tradition that it’s the monograph that really counts. Perhaps if he’d written the same ideas as a series of short papers, they would have reached a wider audience. But Being No One is a major piece of work and its influence has been massive, both on me and on the field as a whole. Myself, I found time to read it in between leaving the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego and coming back to Sussex, to start my faculty job. It was the first time I’d closely read analytic philosophy of this sort applied to the mind and the self, and it taught me a huge amount. I learned a lot of useful concepts, such as ideas about the transparency and opacity of mental representations, which have turned out to be particularly important. In my understanding, there are some representations that we experience as being representations—and so are opaque—while there are other representations which we do not experience as being representations—in some sense we see through them, hence the term transparency. This distinction has a lot of relevance for how we connect representational speak to descriptions of phenomenology. For example, if you look at the sun and then look away, you will experience an afterimage. But you do not experience the afterimage as being a real thing out there in the world. In this case, your visual experience, insofar as it’s a representation, has the property of opacity. But when I look out of the window, and I see a red car across the street, I do not experience the perceptual predictions that underlie this experience as being representations—here, the process is transparent. I experience redness as a property of the car, not as a property of a representation of the car. Again, this goes back to Hume, who wrote beautifully about how the mind ‘spreads itself’ out into the world, so that we ‘gild and stain’ natural objects with properties derived from the mind. And of course, as Metzinger explained, the same distinctions apply to the self too. We experience the self as being in some sense real because the underlying perceptions are mediated transparently. Yes, it really is, and people come at it from different angles. One challenge is that studying the self is a bit hard empirically. By comparison, visual perception is very easy to study. We can control the input very precisely, and we have many decades of elaborate psychophysics on which to build. Experimental studies of the self are a bit harder, but they can be done. It pays to be wary though. I’m thinking here of the famous rubber hand illusion, which reveals the malleability of experiences of body ownership and has often been used to support the argument that these experiences depend on multisensory integration. The reason I’m wary of it is because of work my colleagues and I have done which indicates that it might just be a suggestion effect. Well the data are consistent with this interpretation, but there’s been a lot of debate. Let’s start with suggestibility, which is a stable aspect of selfhood, a psychological trait. People used to call it hypnotic suggestibility, but we—led by my colleagues Pete Lush and Zoltan Dienes— now call it ‘phenomenological control’. This trait reflects how suggestible people are to having experiences that they expect to have, such as those that might be suggested to them—either explicitly or implicitly—by an experimenter. In psychology this is all wrapped up with the issue of demand characteristics. Demand characteristics are those aspects of an experiment that may suggest to the participant—again, either explicitly or implicitly—to respond in particular way. Typically, you want to avoid or control for demand characteristics when setting up experiments, and people that are highly suggestible may respond more strongly to demand characteristics. What this means is that highly suggestible people might have experiences that you’re implicitly encouraging them to have, even though they need not be engaging in any kind of explicit response bias, or reactance, or anything of that sort. We suspect that this is what’s going on in the rubber hand illusion. People have the experiences that they expect to have. We don’t know if this is the only thing that’s going on—multisensory integration may play a role too—but there’s no good evidence for that yet. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In one experiment, led by Pete Lush , we found substantial correlations between individual suggestibility and strength of the rubber hand illusion. And we also know, from another of Pete’s experiments , that people have very strong expectations about what they should experience in the rubber hand illusion. Put these two things together, and it becomes immediately very concerning that the experiences people report in the rubber hand illusion may be suggestion effects rather than—or as well as—due to the standard explanation of multisensory integration. I remember appealing to this standard explanation back in my 2017 TED talk —and I’d now say things differently, for sure. What’s more, suggestion effects of this sort might apply very broadly across all sorts of experiments in psychology. So one of our big research programs now—this is with Pete Lush, Zoltan Dienes, Warrick Roseboom, Federico Micheli and others—is to clarify all this landscape, and try to figure out both the problems: which experiments might have been confounded by demand characteristics and suggestibility in ways that were not appreciated­, but also the opportunities, because we can use suggestion effects to study experience. From this perspective, suggestion—phenomenological control—provides a way of getting people to have experiences through top-down influences. Well I rather think it’s an empirically open question. Indeed, one of the plans we have is to go back even to the Müller-Lyer illusion and just ask: Does the strength of the illusion correlate with, firstly, people’s expectations about what they should report? Secondly, does it correlate with individual suggestibility? My guess is that it won’t, but the proper experiments have yet to be done, at least to my knowledge. Then you go one stage a bit higher up. A PhD student, Federico Micheli, is looking at the McGurk effect . In this illusion, you see a face mouthing one syllable while listening to a different syllable, and the combined, integrated auditory percept is something else again. For example, if you listen to ‘ba’ while watching a mouth say ‘ga’ you’ll probably report hearing something like ‘da’. It’s very perceptually strong. A canonical example of multi-sensory integration, one might think. Well, we will see. I want to say one more thing on Being No One . It really is a book worth making time for, if you can. Metzinger has also written a trade book called The Ego Tunnel , which is a shorter, more accessible account of the same core ideas. It’s from 2009, so it’s been around a while, but it’s a really wonderful book. Another book I wanted to mention in this context is a fairly obvious choice, Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error , which is a foundational book about the self, in particular because it reconnects emotion with rationality and the body. It was the first book that I read that reminded me that the body is not just a robot that takes the brain from meeting to meeting. It’s deeply involved in our cognition and experience. Then, finally, there is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made , which is very recent and very up to date. It’s a beautiful exposition of ideas that she and I have developed somewhat independently, thinking about emotions as a certain, specific variety of perceptual prediction—of inference about the state of the body in context."