Thomas Metzinger

Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, emeritus

Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material

Thomas Metzinger Photograph by Jumpilo, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Thomas Metzinger argues that no one has ever been a self. What exists is a phenomenal self model, a representation the system builds of itself, and the reason it does not feel like a representation is a property he calls transparency. The system cannot see the model as a model, so it looks straight through it at what appears to be an underlying subject. There is no subject. There is a model whose construction is invisible from inside.

The account is mechanistic enough to be built, which is why it recurs in AI discussion. A system with a self model that is opaque, that it can inspect and recognise as a construct, would not have the phenomenal character Metzinger describes. Transparency is the specific property to look for, and it is a stronger requirement than merely having a self representation.

He is also the field’s most forceful voice on the ethics of building such systems. He has argued for a moratorium on synthetic phenomenology on the grounds that creating a system capable of suffering, in order to study whether it suffers, is not a research programme anyone should run. That position sits uncomfortably alongside his functionalism, and he holds both deliberately.

Known for. The self model theory of subjectivity, phenomenal transparency, and a proposed moratorium on synthetic phenomenology

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Thomas Metzinger is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.