Thomas Metzinger

subjective experience is a biological data format

Out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths.

What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color. Phenomenal color. Appearance. For your conscious eyes only.

there is no little man inside the head

We could say that the system as a whole (the Ego Machine), or the organism using this brain-constructed conscious self-model, can be called a “self.”

Since our inbuilt existential need for full emotional and physical security can never be fulfilled, we have a strong drive toward delusion and bizarre belief systems.

as you were reading these last several paragraphs, you—the organism as a whole—were continuously mistaking yourself for the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.

All of this is happening on a very basic level in our brains (philosophers call this level of information-processing “subpersonal”; computer scientists call it “subsymbolic”). On this fundamental level, which forms the preconditions of knowing something, truth and falsity do not yet exist, nor is there an entity who could have the illusion of a self.

There is nobody in the system who could be mistaken or confused about anything—the homunculus does not exist.

In sum and on the level of phenomenology as well as on the level of neurobiology, the conscious self is neither a form of knowledge nor an illusion. It just is what it is.