Collapse Volume IV, 185–207

Chapter

The Shadow of a Puppet Dance

Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood

EXCERPT

In his Being No-One, Thomas Metzinger sets out a radical challenge to any philosophical defence of the status of subjective self-consciousness against the incursions of reductive neuroscience. Deploying all the resources of a nascent science of consciousness, Metzinger proposes at a stroke to eliminate selves from the ontological horizon and to destroy our most cherished ‘originary’ intuitions about ‘ourselves’ and our place in the world. Such intuitions furnish the precondition for the phenomenological description of the world that distinguishes between natural, manifest appearances and the supervening artifices of theoretical knowledge……