As you may know, I’m busy reading for my diploma thesis. If I manage to pull myself to it, that is, which is often not until noon, but regularly lasts to midnight and beyond. I happen to like reading at the office then, as that’s a way for me to switch context – “now I’m at home, doing whatever people do at home” and “now I’m at the office, learning and reading”. Fairly often, it works.
Anyway, enough “dear journal”, I really have to quote these few sentences from Thomas Metzinger’s book, Being No One. While they do build on a lot of what he has written up to that point (starting with definitions of “transparency”, said constraints, “representation” and “phenomenal experience”), they’re utterly brilliant on their own as well, I think, and a big stepping stone for tackling the problem known as the hard problem of consciousness.
[...] If all other necessary and sufficient constraints for the emergence of phenomenal experience are satisfied by a given representational system, the addition of a transparent self-model will by necessity lead to the emergence of a phenomenal self. Phenomenal selfhood results from autoepistemic closure in a self-representing system; it is a lack of information. The prereflexive, preattentive experience of being someone results directly from the contents of the currently active self-model being transparent. [...] Under a general principle of ontological parsimony it is not necessary (or rational) to assume the existence of selves, because as theoretical entities they fulfill no indispensable explanatory function. What exists are information-processing systems engaged in the transparent process of phenomenal self-modelling. All that can be explained by the phenomenological notion of a “self” can also be explained using the representationalist notion of a transparent self-model.
Really, just brilliant.
(I do hope that this falls under fair use in the context of scientific research, if the quotation is too expansive please notify me and I will remove it, or narrow it down further, immediately.)
