Thomas Metzinger

Thomas Metzinger is a Professor Emeritus at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and a member of the German National Academy Leopoldina. He has worked mainly in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and applied ethics.

Latest News:

Lars Sandved-Smith wins The 2024 Computational Phenomenology of Pure Awareness Prize, with this contribution.
MPE3 meets MOC5.
The 2024 Computational Phenomenology of Pure Awareness Prize has been announced.

Open Access: Text

Most wanted:

Free download is here. See also: The MPE Project.
(2015; with Jennifer Windt). Open MIND. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
(2017; with Wanja Wiese). Philosophy and Predictive Processing. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
(2020; with Raphael Millière). Radical Disruptions of Self-Consciousness. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(I).

(2018) The Festschrift for my 60th birthday: 55 authors, 28 contributions, all completely open access.
Edited by Sascha Fink, Wanja Wiese and Jennifer Windt.

“Spontaneous, task-unrelated thought” → All papers on mind wandering
“OBEs” → Looking for those older papers on out-of-body experiences?
“Applied Ethics of AI & VR” → Miscellaneous

More on Google Scholar; an old-fashioned publication list (in German) is here.

Recent OA-material:

(2022). Towards a global artificial intelligence charter. In S. Vöneky, S., P. Kellmeyer, O. Müller & W. Burgard (Hrsg.), The Cambridge Handbook of Responsible Artificial Intelligence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge Law Handbooks). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009207898.013
(2021). Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology. Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 8 (1), 1-24.
Three publications by the High-Level Expert Group on Artifical Intelligence
(2021; with Alex Gamma). The Minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire (MPE-92M): Towards a phenomenological profile of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators. PLOS ONE 16(7): e0253694.
(2020). Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(I), 7. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2020.I.46
(2020). Self-modeling epistemic spaces and the contraction principle. Cognitive Neuropsychology https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2020.1729110
(2019). Dretske on Transparency. In M. Frauchiger [ed.], @@@ – Themes from Dretske. (Lauener Library of Analytical Philosophy, ed. by W. K. Essler, D. Føllesdal, and M. Frauchiger, vol. 6) Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
(2018). Why is Virtual Reality interesting for Philosophers? Front. Robot. AI (Frontiers in Robotics and AI) 5: 292.
(2018). Seli, Paul; Kane, Michael J.; Metzinger, Thomas; Smallwood, Jonathan; Schacter, Daniel L.; Maillet, David et al.: The Family-Resemblances Framework for Mind-Wandering Remains Well Clad. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(11), 959-961. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.07.007.
(2017). The Problem of Mental Action: Predictive Control without Sensory Sheets. In T. Metzinger and W. Wiese (eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing . Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.

(2017; co-authored with Wanja Wiese). Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing. In T. Metzinger and W. Wiese (eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing . Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
Penultimate draft: (2017). Why is mind wandering interesting for philosophers? In Kieran C.R. Fox & Kalina Christoff [eds.] (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-wandering, Creativity, Dreaming, and Clinical Conditions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frith, C. & Metzinger, T. (2016). What’s the Use of Consciousness? How the Stab of Conscience Made Us Really Conscious. In Andreas K. Engel, Karl J. Friston & Danica Kagic (eds), The Pragmatic Turn: Toward Action-Oriented Views in Cognitive Science . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapter references | See also: Ernst Strüngmann Forum.
Madary, M. & Metzinger, T. (2016). Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 3 (3). doi: 10.3389/frobt.2016.00003 See also: Press release |New Scientist | EU DAE Blog
Metzinger, T. (2016). Suffering. In Kurt Almqvist & Anders Haag (eds.), The Return of Consciousness. Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation.
Metzinger, T. (2015). M-Autonomy. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22 (11-12), 270-302.
Metzinger, T. & Windt, J.M. (2015). Open MIND. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. ISBN: 978-3-95857-102-0.
Metzinger, T. (2015). About this collection. In 2015a.
Metzinger, T. & Windt, J.M. (2015). What does it mean to have an open mind? In 2015a.
Metzinger T. (2013). The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy. Front. Psychol. 4: 931. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931
Metzinger, T. (2013). Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research. Front. Psychol. 4: 746. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00746
Metzinger, T. (2013). Two principles for robot ethics. In E. Hilgendorf & J.-P. Günther (Hrsg.), Robotik und Gesetzgebung. Baden-Baden: Nomos. S. 263-302.

Public understanding of science:

Metzinger, T. (2013). Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty. Mainz: Self-published. ISBN: 978‐3‐00‐041539‐5 | ISBN-A / doi: 10.978.300/0415395.

A recent summary talk in California is here. Arabic translation: ة توماس ميتزنجر – الروحانية والأمانة الفكر Georgian translation: სულიერება და ინტელექტუალური კეთილსინდისიერება

Metzinger, T. (2018). Are you sleepwalking now? AEON, January 2018.

Metzinger, T. (2017). Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism (BAAN). EDGE Essay [8.7.17] Auf Deutsch in der NZZ vom 2. Dezember 2017 [PDF]

Metzinger, T. (2017). Silicon Valley is selling an ancient dream of immortality. Financial Times, 18th of August 2017.

Metzinger, T. (2017). Is God an evil teenage hacker? (Conversation with David Chalmers) More small stuff for Edge.

And some fun stuff in The New Yorker…

Open Access: Video

MPE

Active Inference Insights 21 with Darius Parvizi-Wayne (May 2024)
A longer chat with Karl Friston (December 2023).
Pufendorf Lectures 2021 (October 2021, University of Lund, Sweden.
Minimal Phenomenal Experience. Overview Lecture plus discussion at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (September 2020).
See also: The MPE-Project

Bewusstseinskultur

Bewusstseinskultur and Secular Spirituality (Usona Institute, Madison, WI, May 2023)
Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty (KFA, Ojai, CA, May 2017)
Zen, Awareness, and American Spirituality with John Vervaeke and Rick Repetti (January 26, 2024)
The Self in Meditation, Politics and Science with Robert Wright
Bewusstseinskultur, Insight, and Intellectual Honesty, Berlin, February 15, 2024, at the INSIGHT Forum.
Towards a Rational, Evidence-Based Enculturation of Psychedelic Experiences: A Protocol for Phase II (Berlin, September 9, 2018) Open the transcript for subtitles! Slides are here: Rational Enculturation.

Various Conversations

With Michael Levin: Consciousness Across Scales, (November 16, 2024)
With Shane Farnsworth: The “Self” Is An Illusion | Escaped Sapiens #72 (August 2024)
With Matthew Geleta on the Paradigm Podcast (October 2023).
In the Ego Tunnel: A Conversation with Sue Blackmore. Recorded at the SwedishAx:son Johnson Foundation June 15, 2015.
Interview with Claudia Faita, Pisa, October 2013, organized by Scuola SuperioreSant’Anna and Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (PERCRO). Various older lectures
Mental Autonomy and Mental Action: Mind Wandering, Epistemic Agency, and Predictive Control without Sensory Sheets
Lecture given at Central European University (Budapest, 14th of March 2017)
Body-Representation and Self-Consciousness: From Embodiment to Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood Lecture given at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik (Leipzig, 27th of February, 2013)
Free Will, Hallucinated Agency, and Anarchic Robot Syndrome (Bratislava, 25th of February 2017)
A semi-popular talk on the phenomenology of volition.
The Perfect Human Being Some short interview clips from Dutch TV (2015; 13 minutes)

“The Perfect Human Being“: English/Dutch documentary (27th of May, 2015)
(EA Global X, Basel, September 2015)
Suffering A Lecture given at the Swedish Ax:son Johnson Foundation June 15, 2015. Free paper.
Video of 2004 Foerster Lecture at UC Berkeley, Oct. 18, 2004.An ancient talk (I still had hair…): “Being No One: Consciousness, the Phenomenal Self, and the First-Person Perspective”

Cognitive Enhancement; overview lecture on the neuroethics of cognitive enhancement. Given at the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility in Dallas, February 10, 2011 | Also on iTunes For a related print publication, see Metzinger, T. & Hildt, E. (2011). Cognitive Enhancement. In J. Illes and B.J. Sahakian (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp.245-264.
TED talk at TEDxRheinMain (a badly recorded, non-academic, super-simple 18-minute talk on transparent self-models; in two parts: Part 1 & Part 2)

Open Access: Audio

Jeff Adler (24 March 2024) The Elephant and the Blind
Michael Taft (28 December 2017) Consciousness, Spirituality, and Intellectual Honesty
Sam Harris #96 (10 September 2017) The Nature of Consciousness
Tony Sobrado (27 September 2017) What is Consciousness?
… and another interview at 3:AM MAGAZINE that really is a bit too long – isn’t it?
All in the Mind, presented by Natasha Mitchell
Brain Science Podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell

Historical material: Neural Correlates of Consciousness (Bremen, June 19-22, 1998)

Symposium 3 (Moderator: Bill Banks): Foundational issues in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness

Arash Sahraie: Neuronal correlates of visual processing with and without awareness
Stephen Engel: Comparing perceptual and cortical sensitivity to color
Dominic Ffytche: The anatomy of conscious vision

Concluding Lecture

Ernst Pöppel:A syntopic view

The full program plus all abstracts: ASSC2 in Bremen 1998.
The MIT Press book from the conference:

Public understanding of science

The Ego Tunnel

The science of the mind and the myth of the self

11 other languages:

Peer-reviewed & Print (Academic)

- Metzinger, T. (2024). The enculturation problem. In Chris Letheby & Philip Gerrans (Hrsg.), Philosophical Perspectives on Psychedelic Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Solomon, R., Noel, J.-P., Łukowska, M., Faivre, N., Metzinger, T., Serino, A. & Blanke, O. (2017). Unconscious integration of multisensory bodily inputs in the peripersonal space shapes bodily self-consciousness. Cognition, 166 (September 2017), 174-183.
- Pliushch, I. & Metzinger T. (2015). Self-deception and the Dolphin Model of Cognition. In Rocco J. Gennaro (Hrsg.), Disturbed Consciousness. New Essays on Psychopathology and Theories of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 167-208.
- Metzinger, T. (2014e). How does the brain encode epistemic reliability? Perceptual presence, phenomenal transparency, and counterfactual richness. Cognitive Neuroscience: doi: 10.1080/17588928.2014.905519.
- Metzinger, T. (2014f). What is the specific significance of dream research for philosophy of mind? In N. Tranquillo (ed.), Dream Consciousness. Allan Hobson’s New Approach to the Brain and Its Mind. Vienna Circle Institute Library 3, (Chapter 22), 161-166. Cham: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-07296-8_22.
- Metzinger, T. (2014h). First-order embodiment, second-order embodiment, third-order embodiment: From spatiotemporal self-location to minimal phenomenal selfhood (Chapter 26). In Lawrence Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. London: Routledge. Pp. 272-286.

About Me

Contact: <lastname> at uni-mainz.de
Journalists: ZIP file with free press photos; short CV as editable WORD-file.

Thomas Metzinger (*1958 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) was Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz until 2019. He is past president of the German Cognitive Science Society (2005-2007) and of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2009-2011). As of 2011, he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the Barbara Wengeler Foundation (2019-2024), and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2008 to 2009 he served as a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study; from 2014 to 2019 he was a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College; from 2019 to 2021 he was awarded a Senior-Forschungsprofessur by the Ministry of Science, Education and Culture. From 2018 to 2020 Metzinger worked as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. In 2021 he was awarded Pufendorf-Medal, in 2022 he was elected into the German National Academy of Science.

In the English language, he has edited two collections on consciousness (“Conscious Experience”, Imprint Academic, 1995; “Neural Correlates of Consciousness”, MIT Press, 2000) and published one major scientific monograph (“Being No One – The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”, MIT Press, 2003). In 2009, he published a popular book, which addresses a wider audience and discusses the ethical, cultural and social consequences of consciousness research (“The Ego Tunnel – The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”). Important recent Open Access collections are Open MIND at http://www.open-mind.net (2015, with Jennifer Windt), Philosophy and Predictive Processing at http://predictive-mind.net (2017, with Wanja Wiese), and Radical Disruptions of Self-Consciousness (2020, with Raphaël Millière). In 2024, he published a major OA-monograph with the MIT Press titled The Elephant and the Blind (see also top of page).

News

Lars Sandved-Smith wins The 2024 Computational Phenomenology of Pure Awareness Prize, with this contribution.
MPE3 meets MOC5.
The 2024 Computational Phenomenology of Pure Awareness Prize has been announced.
The Chinese Ego Tunnel is out.
December 2022: I have been elected into the German National Academy of Sciences.
My 2021 Samuel Pufendorf-lectures in Lund (Sweden) are online.
New open-access journal online: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences.
The MPE-Research Network is beginning its work.
I have been awarded a Senior-Forschungsprofessur (2019-2021).
The Spanish Ego Tunnel is out.
- I have accepted a nomination into the High Level Group on Artificial Intelligence of the European Commission (2018-2020).
  → Communication from the Commission of The European Parliament | European AI Alliance
The Polish Ego Tunnel is out.

- There is a free Arabic translation of “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty”:
  توماس ميتزنجر – الروحانية والأمانة الفكرية
- I received the inaugural Best Paper Prize of the Society for Mind-Matter Research for the period of 2003-2017 in their official journal Mind and Matter
  Metzinger, T. (2005c). Out-of-body experiences as the origin of the concept of a “soul”.
- The Russian Ego Tunnel is out:
  Metzinger, T. (2017a). Наука о мозге и миф о своем Я. Тоннель Эго. Moskau: Издательство АСТ.
You can now buy Open MIND as a book.
- The Japanese Ego Tunnel is out:
  Metzinger, T. (2015j). エゴ・トンネル――心の科学と「わたし」という謎単行本. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
- The Romanian Ego Tunnel is out:
  Metzinger, T. (2015n). Tunelul Eului. Ştiinţa Minţii şi Mitul Sinelui. Bukarest: Humanitas.
Metzinger, T. (2015e). Coscienza e Fenomenologia del Sé. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.
From 2014 to 2019 I will work as a Fellow in the Gutenberg Research College.
There is a free Arabic translation of “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty”: توماس ميتزنجر – الروحانية والأمانة الفكرية
I received the inaugural Best Paper Prize of the Society for Mind-Matter Research for the period of 2003-2017 in their official journal Mind and Matter.
Out-of-body experiences as the origin of the concept of a “soul”.
The Russian Ego Tunnel is out.
The Japanese Ego Tunnel is out.
The Romanian Ego Tunnel is out.
Metzinger, T. (2015e). Coscienza e Fenomenologia del Sé.
From 2014 to 2019 I will work as a Fellow in the Gutenberg Research College.