Thomas Metzinger

In the current debate, very few people have penetrated as deeply into the self-model theory of subjectivity and have developed such a scholarly expertise on the project as a whole as Dorothée Legrand has done. In the last sentence of her commentary, Legrand alludes to the ugly consequences I have to face after calling the book Being No One: I am suddenly confronted with people from all over the world who are stomping their feet on the ground like stubborn children, claiming that they definitely are someone, and that they definitely have a self. In 1993, I published a German precursor to BNO, titled Subject and Self-Model—The Perspectivalness of Phenomenal Consciousness Against the Background of a Naturalist Theory of Mental Representation. From this title alone, it can be seen that I was not interested in demolishing classical theories of the self as a metaphysical substance, but rather in an empirically informed representationalist approach to the phenomenal self. In particular, I wanted to get a grip on the relationship between the epistemic subject and the phenomenal self it uses in the attempt to gain self-knowledge. The mistake I made, and to which Legrand alludes at the end of her brilliant commentary, was assuming that for a predominately American readership, such a title would be much too “wordy.” Now I am paying the price – the price for having diverted many of my readers’ attention to discussions about how our folk-phenomenological intuitions about selfhood can somehow be rescued. The title Being No One has distracted a lot of attention that would probably be better focused on the subtle and difficult issues associated with the attempt to construct a tenable theory about the interaction between self-knowledge and self-experience. But Dorothée Legrand cannot be distracted.

This is a short sketch of some central ideas developed in my recent book _Being No One_ (BNO hereafter). A more systematic summary, which focuses on short answers to a set of specific, individual questions is already contained _in _the book, namely as BNO section 8.2. Here, I deliberately and completely exclude all work related to semantically differentiating and empirically constraining the philosophical concept of a "quale" (mostly Chapter 2, 3 & 8), all proposals regarding conceptual foundations for the overall theory (2 & 5), all of the neurophenomenological case-studies used to test and refine it (4 & 7), and all remarks of a more general or methodological character (1 & 8). In particular, the present Pr

What we traditionally call ‘conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content. Conceptually, it must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour. Empirical research shows that we are not mentally autonomous subjects for about two thirds of our conscious lifetime, because while conscious cognition is unfolding, it often cannot be inhibited, suspended, or terminated. The instantiation of a stable first- person perspective as well as of certain necessary conditions of personhood turn out to be rare, graded, and dynamically variable properties of human beings. I argue that individual representational events only become part of a personal-level process by being functionally integrated into a specific form of transparent conscious self-representation, the ‘epistemic agent model’. The EAM may be the true origin of our consciously experienced firstperson perspective