Being No One

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody
ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious
experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content
of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher,
draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis
of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between
the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and
metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and
hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness.
Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity
emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether
conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence
of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how
our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are
themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious
minds.