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Quote by Thomas Metzinger

“I believe that if we would carefully apply the distinction between transparency and opacity to the different layers of the human self-model, looking at self-consciousness in a much more careful and fine-grained manner, then we might also arrive at a new answer to your original question: What a "first-person perspective" really is.”

Quote by Thomas Metzinger

Author

Thomas Metzinger

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher born on March 12, 1958. His research focuses on the philosophy of consciousness and cognitive science, particularly on the nature and function of consciousness. Metzinger is known for his in-depth exploration of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and scientific philosophy. more

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“Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.”

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“For a human being, to possess a consciously experienced first-person perspective means to have acquired a very specific functional profile and distinctive level of representational content in one's currently active phenomenal self-model: It has, episodically, become a dynamic inner model of a knowing self.”

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“The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".”

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“I believe that gut feelings, the sense of balance, and spatial self-perception are so firmly coupled to our biological body that we will never be able to leave it experientially on a permanent basis.”

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“A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.”

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“As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.”

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“All attention is introspection.”

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“Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.”

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