Pure Awareness, Self-Models, Phenomenal Transparency

hello everyone and welcome back to active inference insights I your host Daris parv Wayne and today I am truly honored to be speaking to one of this Century's most important philosophers Professor Thomas metzinger Thomas is Professor emiritus of theoretical philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University of Minds co-founder of the German effective altruism foundation and president of the barbar vengera foundation in 2019 he found founded the minimal phenomenal experience or MP project and just this year released the book The Elephant and the blind which details the results of that project bringing together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure Consciousness his work focuses on Consciousness and he is best known for establishing the self model theory of subjectivity Thomas Professor matzinger we've we've spoken on email we've had our sort of you know we've had our email friends but it's actually so lovely to to kind of see you or be it virtually um so thank you so much honestly it's an absolute honor and anyone who knows me knows that I'm a massive fan of yours I mean in the latest version of the flow States paper it has met singer 2003 2004 2005 2 and so on yeah something wrong with you thanks for having me anyway no well well it's one of those things I mean with respect to your work I feel like the past year has been sort of half active influence half met singer um so recipe for disaster but let's look at it no no it's why it's being fun I mean let I think a good place to start for the audience is to kind of out before we get into the new book because I do want to touch on that is to First outline the self model theory of subjectivity the smt because um it might strike people as initially rather counterintuitive so perhaps you could just give a brief account of the fundamental um claims or axioms of the smt with respect to its kind of key constraints whether that's transparency globality and so on yeah so in the Anglo-Saxon World there is this absolutely unreadable 2003 book um being no one this actually has a precursor most of you will not know in the German system we have two major thesis we have a PhD thesis and 5 years later we have a habilitation thesis which is a much bigger thing my committee was 17 people wow and in 1993 I published a book called subject on self model um sub the subject and self model and the subtitle was the perspectival of phenomenal States from the perspective of a naturalist theory of mental representation so this already tells you what this is actually about um so being in the Consciousness Community I'm one of the guys that founded the ASC in 1994 I was always of the opinion that Consciousness is not one problem but a whole bundle of problems some more empirical some more conceptual and that the center the most difficult uh thing is what is a first person perspective what makes a state a subjective state in any given information processing system so I set out to tackle this and then 10 years later I had um a wonderful year one of the two best years in my academic career at UC San Diego where uh Paul and Patricia church had host me was absolutely great in the philosophy and the cognitive science department and I wrote the whole thing in English and updated it in that year in the eighth floor of the HSS building Humanities and social sciences and I thought you can't do that title Americans need something more crude yeah yeah I said call the book being no one and uh that is what you have now uh and the idea this is indirectly it's also trying to make a contribution to the problem of Consciousness but the idea is to say what is a first person perspective really because everybody in Neuroscience or in philosophy talks about for instance like Dave traas would be One PP facts and three PP facts but the notion of a firsters perspective is taken as a conceptual primitive as if we all knew what that is but um it's actually a hybrid metaphor so…