Speaker Bio
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, 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). A recent Open Access monograph is The Elephant and the Blind (MIT Press, 2024).
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Bewusstseinskultur, Intellectual Honesty, and Insight
The talk will begin with a brief introduction to the concept of "consciousness culture", using a series of six examples. It will then consider the broader context of how to successfully enculturate valuable states of consciousness, focusing on the example of psychedelics. The second half of the talk will begin with the question: What exactly is an 'insight'? I will then highlight some of the epistemological problems faced by all insight-oriented forms of psychotherapy.