Tag: Being No One

No I

No such thing as "I" or "self" exists in the world: nobody ever had or was a "I".

All that exists are phenomenal "I"s, as they appear in conscious experience.

The phenomenal "I", however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model."

We are systems of ongoing process, we are not individuals, we only maintain a model of individuality. For some reason, these system fail to notice that their model of individuality is just a model, they mistake the model for the real.

This error is part of a broader misconception we have of mixing the representations of reality we have in our mind with reality itself. We regard the mental representation of an object as if it were the object itself.

The reason for this error is that the systems that map and represent for us the world and ourselves are "transparent" as the philosopher George Edward Moore used to call it. We do not see the mental processes that construct for us the representation of reality but see through them. This is the reason why whatever is represented to us is not grasped by us as a representation but as the reality itself.

Video Ergo Sum

From the Scientific Research "Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness" by Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger, Olaf Blanke:

Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders.

This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading to a striking disturbance of bodily self-consciousness.

On the basis of these clinical data, we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body.

We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders.

Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.