The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

“Millions of years ago, nature’s virtual reality achieved what today’s software engineers still strive for: the phenomenal properties of ‘presence’ and ‘full immersion.’ From an engineering point of view, the problems involved in creating successful virtual environments are problems of advanced interface design. A virtual interface is a system of transducers, signal processors, hardware and software. It creates an interactive medium that conveys information to the user’s senses while constantly monitoring the user’s behavior and employing it to update and manipulate the virtual environment.

”Conscious experience, too, is an interface, an invisible, perfect internal medium allowing an organism to interact flexibly with itself. It is a control device. It functions by creating an internal user interface—an ‘as if’ (that is, virtual) reality. It filters information, has a high bandwidth, is unambiguous and reliable, and generates a sense of presence. More important, it also generates a sense of self. The self-model is much like the mouse pointer on the virtual desktop of your PC—or the little red arrow on the subway map that advises ‘You are here.’ It places you at the center of a behavioral space, of your consciously experienced world-model, your inner virtual reality.

”The ego is a special part of this virtual reality. By generating an internal image of the organism as a whole, it allows the organism to appropriate its own hardware. It is evolution’s answer to the need for explaining one’s inner and outer actions to oneself, predicting one’s behavior, and monitoring critical system properties. Finally, it allows the system to depict internally the history of its actions as its own history. (Autobiographical memory, of course, is one of the most important layers of the human self-model, enabling us to appropriate our own history, inside-time, and outside-time, the Now and the past.) Consciousness gives you flexibility, and global control gives you the Ego. On the level of conscious experience, this process of functionally appropriating one’s hardware—one’s body—in a holistic fashion is mirrored as the sense of global ownership, or minimal selfhood.”

-Thomas Metzinger, 2009