Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.
Thomas MetzingerConsciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.
Thomas MetzingerI believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.
Thomas MetzingerA lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.
Thomas MetzingerI think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.
Thomas Metzinger