Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.
Thomas MetzingerI 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.
Thomas MetzingerOf course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.
Thomas MetzingerAs modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.
Thomas MetzingerSpeaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.
Thomas MetzingerI believe that if we would carefully apply the distinction between transparency and opacity to the different layers of the human self-model, looking at self-consciousness in a much more careful and fine-grained manner, then we might also arrive at a new answer to your original question: What a "first-person perspective" really is.
Thomas Metzinger