Metzinger’s No-Self Representational Theory of Subjectivity

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger presents a representationalist and functional analysis of subjectivity, the consciously experienced first-person perspective (Metzinger, 2004). What has been traditionally called “conscious thought,” he argues, is actually “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, Metzinger states, “conscious thought … must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour” (Metzinger, 2015).

No-Self and Phenomenal Consciousness

A starting assumption is that phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience), “rather than being an epiphenomenon, has a causal role in the optimisation of certain human behaviours” (Frith and Metzinger, 2016).

A leitmotif of Metzinger's models is that there are no such things as “selves”; selves do not exist in the world: “nobody ever had or was a self.” All that exists, he argues, are “phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a ‘transparent self-model’” (Metzinger, 2004).

Metzinger employs empirical research to support his deflationary no-self model, showing how “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.” This means that “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” (Metzinger, 2015).

Meditation and Pure Awareness

Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries—more than 500 experiential reports—Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate, as he puts it, “the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.”

Metzinger explores “the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness” in order to assemble “what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness” (Metzinger, 2024).

Representationalism, the Epistemic Agent Model, and Culture

Metzinger uses an interdisciplinary, multi-layer analysis of phenomenological, representationalist, informational-computational, functional, and physical-neurobiological kinds of descriptions. His representationalist theory analyzes its target properties—those aspects of the domain to be explained. He seeks to make progress “by describing conscious systems as representational systems and conscious states as representational states” (Metzinger, 2000).

He argues 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’ (EAM).” The EAM, he suspects, “may be the true origin of our consciously experienced first-person perspective” (Metzinger, 2015).

Metzinger's resolution of the mind-body problem follows directly: our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences, phenomenal consciousness, “can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds” (Metzinger, 2004).

A corollary of Metzinger's work concerns individual behavior and collective culture, based on our perception of the experience of being an agent that causes events in the world and the belief that we “could have done otherwise” (the test of libertarian free will). This experience and belief enable us “to justify our behaviour to ourselves and to others and, in the longer term, create a cultural narrative about responsibility.”

Metzinger concludes that “conscious experience is necessary for optimizing flexible intrapersonal interactions and for the emergence of cumulative culture” (Frith and Metzinger, 2016).