Thomas Metzinger

One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves.

Until we become happier beings than our ancestors were, we should refrain from any attempt to impose our mental structure on artificial carrier systems.

Everything we have learned about the transparency of phenomenal states clearly shows that “actual contact with reality” and “certainty” can be simulated too, and that nature has already done it in our brains by creating the Ego Tunnel.

we should refrain from doing anything that could increase the overall amount of suffering and confusion in the universe.

variety of phenomenal experience generated by the human brain is not a treasure but a burden: Averaged over a lifetime, the balance between joy and suffering is weighted toward the latter in almost all of its bearers. From Buddha to Schopenhauer, there is a long philosophical tradition positing, essentially,

your primate emotions reflect only an ancient primate logic of survival. You are driven by the primitive principles of what was good or bad for an ancient species of mortals on this planet.

We are Ego Machines, natural information-processing systems that arose in the process of biological evolution on this planet. The Ego is a tool—one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behavior and understanding the behavior of others. We each live our conscious life in our own Ego Tunnel, lacking direct contact with outside reality but possessing an inward, first-person perspective.

the world simulation constantly being created by our brains is built around a center. But we are unable to experience it as such, or our self-models as models.

Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential conflict, and we seem to be the first creatures on this planet to experience it consciously. Many of us, in fact, spend our lives trying to avoid experiencing it. Maybe this feature of our self-model is what makes us inherently religious:

The Ego evolved as an instrument in social cognition, and one of its greatest functional advantages was that it allowed us to read the minds of other animals or conspecifics—and then to deceive them. Or deceive ourselves.