Thomas Metzinger Quotes
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.
The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.
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.
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.
Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.
Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.
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.
The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.
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.
Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.
Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.
I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.
If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little "Think me!" and our mind begins to wander.
You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.
