Thomas Metzinger

This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the new working concept. One empirical hypothesis is that the phenomenological prototype of “pure awareness”, to which all such reports refer, really is the content of a predictive model, namely, a Bayesian representation of tonic alertness. On a more abstract conceptual level, it can be described as a model of an unpartitioned epistemic space.

Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its ba- sic assumptions have to be plastic as it were, so that new details and empirical data can continuously be fed into the theoretical model as it grows and becomes more refined. This paper makes an attempt at sketching the outlines of such a theory, offering a representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person perspective. Three phenomenal target properties are centrally relevant

The contributions to this book are original articles, representing a cross-section of current philosophical work on consciousness and thereby allowing students and readers from other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the very latest debate, so that they can then pursue their own research interests more effectively. The volume includes a bibliography on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and brain research, covering the last 25 years and consisting of over 1000 entries in 18 thematic sections, compiled by David Chalmers and Thomas Metzinger

The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section “Plasticity in the Human Mind,” we cover some of the main results suggesting that one’s environment can influence one’s psychological states, as well as recent work on inducing illusions of embodiment. Then, in Section “Illusions of Embodiment and Their Lasting Effect,” we go on to discuss recent evidence indicating that immersion in VR can have psychological effects that last after leaving the virtual environment. In the second part of the article, we turn to the risks and recommendations. We begin, in Section “The Research Ethics of VR,” with the research ethics of VR, covering six main topics: the limits of experimental environments, informed consent, clinical risks, dual-use, online research, and a general point about the limitations of a code of conduct for research. Then, in Section “Risks for Individuals and Society,” we turn to the risks of VR for the general public, covering four main topics: long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, risky content, and privacy. We offer concrete recommendations for each of these 10 topics, summarized in Table 1.

The goal of this short chapter, aimed at philosophers, is to provide an overview and brief explanation of some central concepts involved in predictive processing (PP). Even those who consider themselves experts on the topic may find it helpful to see how the central terms are used in this collection. To keep things simple, we will first informally define a set of features important to predictive processing, supplemented by some short explanations and an alphabetic glossary. The features described here are not shared in all PP accounts. Some may not be necessary for an individual model; others may be contested. Indeed, not even all authors of this collection will accept all of them. To make this transparent, we have encouraged contributors to indicate briefly which of the features are necessary to support the arguments they provide, and which (if any) are incompatible with their account. For the sake of clarity, we provide the complete list here, very roughly ordered by how central we take them to be for “Vanilla PP” (i.e., a formulation of predictive processing that will probably be accepted by most researchers working on this topic). More detailed explanations will be given below. Note that these features do not specify individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of “predictive processing”. All we currently have is a semantic cluster, with perhaps some overlapping sets of jointly sufficient criteria. The framework is still developing, and it is difficult, maybe impossible, to provide theory-neutral explanations of all PP ideas without already introducing strong background assumptions.

In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and developing a first positive model, concentrating on epistemic mental actions and epistemic self-control. Action initiation is a functionally adequate form of self-deception; mental actions are a specific form of predictive control of effective connectivity, accompanied and possibly even functionally mediated by a conscious “epistemic agent model”. The overall process is aimed at increasing the epistemic value of pre-existing states in the conscious self-model, without causally looping through sensory sheets or using the non-neural body as an instrument for active inference.

Let me begin by focusing on the long list of agreements between the Dan Zahavi and me. As he is such a careful and scholarly author, there are almost no misunderstandings to get out of the way first. At the beginning of section 2, there is a conflation of different concepts of possibility. If we grant that imaginability is conceivability, if we pass over “practical” possibility as a non-defined term, and grant that by “physically” possible Zahavi very likely means “nomologically” possible, it still would present a major step to say that something is conceptually or metaphysically possible. Not everything that is logically or conceptually possible is metaphysically possible as well—metaphysically possible worlds have to be interpreted as a subset of logically possible worlds. How this can be done is a subject of intense and highly technical debates in current philosophy of mind. We cannot possibly enter this debate here, but let me just point out how, for instance, Zahavi’s remarks in the second paragraph of page 4 rest on a conflation between nomological and logical possibility.

differences between dreaming and waking consciousness as well. In this chapter, we will argue that these differences mainly concern the subjective quality of the dreaming experience. The interesting question, from a philosophical point of view, is not so much whether or not dreams are conscious experiences at all. Rather, one must ask in what sense dreams can be considered as conscious experiences, and what happens to the experiential subject during the dream state. Finally, in order to arrive at a more differentiated understanding of dream consciousness, we will contrast our analysis of ordinary dreams with lucid dreams, as well as with the varying degrees of lucidity and cognitive clarity seen in semi-lucid and prelucid dreams

Of all the current philosophical attempts to rescue the concept of “self” by working out a weaker version, one that does not imply an ontological substance or an individual in the metaphysical sense, Marcello Ghin’s is clearly my favorite. His reconstruction of the original theory is absolutely accurate and without any major misunderstandings. Enriching the concept of a “SMT-system” with the notions of “autocatalysis” and “self- sustainment,” and adding the intriguing idea that we are systems reflecting these processes on a new level of complexity, namely with the help of an integrated PSM on the level of conscious experience, seems the way to go if one wants to keep the concept of “self.” I have great difficulties in writing a reply to Ghin’s commentary, simply because I agree with so much in it. Let us see where his approach leads us

Die Übernahme des KI-Unternehmens DeepMind durch Google für rund eine halbe Milliarde US-Dollar signalisierte vor einem Jahr, dass von der KI-Forschung vielversprechende Ergebnisse erwartet werden. Spätestens seit bekannte Wissenschaftler wie Stephen Hawking und Unternehmer wie Elon Musk oder Bill Gates davor warnen, dass künstliche Intelligenz eine Bedrohung für die Menschheit darstellt, schlägt das KI-Thema hohe Wellen. Die Stiftung für Effektiven Altruismus (EAS, vormals GBS Schweiz) hat mit der Unterstützung von Experten/innen aus Informatik und KI ein umfassendes Diskussionspapier zu den Chancen und Risiken der künstlichen Intelligenz verfasst und geht darin auf aktuelle, mittel- und langfristige Herausforderungen im Bereich der KI-Entwicklung ein.

This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of “minimal phenomenal selfhood,” which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and full-body illusions has the potential to make decisive future contributions. Further items on the proposed list of novel research targets include differentiating the concept of a “first-person perspective” on the subcognitive level; investigating relevant phenomenological and neurofunctional commonalities between mind-wandering and dreaming; comparing the functional depth of embodiment across dream and wake states; and demonstrating that the conceptual consequences of cognitive corruption and systematic rationality deficits in the dream state are much more serious for philosophical epistemology (and, perhaps, the methodology of dream research itself) than commonly assumed. The paper closes by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between dream research and philosophy of mind.