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Quote by Thomas Metzinger

“I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.”

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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“Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.”

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“At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.”

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“As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.”

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“Conscious experience as such is an exclusively internal affair: Once all functional properties of your brain are fixed, the character of subjective experience is determined as well.”

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“Subjective time flows forward, the phenomenal self is embedded into this flow, an inner history unfolds. That it is why it is not a bubble, but a tunnel: There is movement in time.”

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“One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust "out-of-the brain experience", a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.”

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“Virtual reality is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible - ideally, by creating a subjective sense of "presence" and full immersion in the user.”

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“I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.”

“What many people don't see is that there are abundant examples of phenomenal opacity: It is one of the most interesting features of the human conscious model of reality that, first, it can contain elements that are not experienced as mind-independent, as unequivocally real, as immediately given, and second, that there is a "gradient of realness" in which one and the same content can be experienced transparently or in an opaque fashion.”

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“I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.”

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