What turns an information processing living thing into something which experiences? What is
thisentity having these experiences? Why is there always someone having the experiences? Well, let us understandThe Architecture of the Experiencing Self
What is it that makes you you? Our sense of owning our hand, initiating our actions, the invisible bubble of space close to the body that feels like ours, the sense that our self is located somewhere within our body even when we are in a sensory deprived chamber - these are not philosophical abstractions. They are measurable, manipulable and mutated in certain neuro-psychiatric conditions and non-ordinary states of Consciousness.
But that leaves a deeper question open. These components — ownership, agency, peripersonal space etc. are the contents of self-experience. What is the container that holds them? What is the underlying structure that makes something feel like experience at all, rather than just information processing? And what happens when you start removing the contents, one by one? How does it feel when stripped of thoughts, body-sense, time, space and ego? Damn, is there a way to do this? I see two precision instruments - pharmacological (Anaesthesia, Psychedelics) and non-pharmacological (Yoga, Meditation and other mind-body practices).
The Self as a Model, Not a Thing
At times, we tend to assume there is something called the self somewhere in the brain (a little homunculus) the one who is having the experience. Well, that entity does not exist. What exists instead is a model — a phenomenal self-model (PSM as called by Prof Metzinger).
Here is the key idea. The living body (with the brain where the bulk of computation is concentrated) is a prediction machine. It is constantly building models of the world to anticipate what comes next. One of the things it models is itself (the organism it is running). The PSM is the brain’s model of you — your body, your location in space, your sense of ownership, your sense of agency. This model is then embedded in a wider model of reality, giving you the felt sense of being a subject in a world.
The trick is that the PSM is transparent. When you look through a window, you do not see the glass. You see what is on the other side through the glass window. The PSM is like that window. You cannot see it as a model. You just live inside it, experiencing its contents as reality. This is what Prof. Metzinger calls the ego tunnel: you are not in the world directly. You are in the tunnel that your self-model constructs, and you experience the end of that tunnel as the world/reality.
This is not a depressing idea. It is a liberating one. It means the self is a process, not a substance. It means it is dynamic, plastic and crucially decomposable. We can break it down.
The rubber hand illusion you have read about here is a beautiful demonstration of this. Our brain updates the PSM to include a rubber hand when the sensory evidence supports it. The ownership feels utterly real because the model runs transparently. The sense of agency measured, the invisible bubble mapped by audio-tactile facilitation - each of these is a component layer of that model and the lab paradigms we use are essentially ways to poke and probe it.
The hero of the story - Experience
Imagine you throw in dough at one end of a box and a weirdly shaped bread comes out
from the other. If we do this 10000 times (varying shapes and sizes of dough) we
should be able to figure out the structure. Ah, wait. If we take experience,
what is the start point and end point? Is this the right mental model to think
about how experiences are generated with brain/body as the structure and
experiences popping into our awareness? Where does it start? I am reminded
of turtles all the way story.
What are the structures that organise experience normally (routinely is a better word) — structures so habitual and so transparent that we can only see them when they begin to alter. Think of it this way, we do not notice the walls of a room when we are inside it. But watch someone/something carefully remove one wall, then another and we start to understand what the room actually was.
No sense of ownership. No sense of agency. No peripersonal space to speak of. No inner narrative, no temporal flow, no boundary between self and other. And yet — something is happening. Something is here. What remains when you strip PSM of all its content layers? The Minimal Phenomenal Experience project, arguably one of the most ambitious phenomenological endeavors in contemporary philosophy of mind is behind that quest The Minimum Requirements for Experience. What is the simplest possible form of conscious experience? Not the richest, not the most interesting — the barest. The irreducible floor.
The cluster of features that characterise what is popularly known as pure consciousness or pure awareness. Sensory content fades systematically. The inner voice goes quiet. The feeling of being an agent, of doing or willing anything, dissolves. Even the narrative sense of being someone — the storyline of “I am Rahul and I am frantically typing this” — falls away.
And yet there is a thereness, a quality of presence without an object. It is not unconsciousness. It is not dreamless sleep. It is something that contemplative traditions across cultures have pointed to for millennia under different names — rigpa, turiya, witness consciousness, pure awareness — and that is worth studying. It could offer a lot of therapeutic value, reduce suffering and nudge humanity towards a culture of consciousness (Bewusstseinskultur). I assume to some extent avenge that itch which pushed our species to climb down that tree, get out of that cave, strike two stones against each other, jump on the log of wood and stand on the toes and jump out of the international space station staring into the void!
The content less, objectless, well language is hitting its limits (ineffability)! The window without anything on the other side. The tunnel before the ego steps in. BUT, what’s there? THAT
The most profound thing about this topic of research for me is what it implies about the relationship between selfhood and awareness. We tend to assume that experience requires a self to have it. But if these frameworks are right, the most minimal form of experience may be precisely the one where the self — as a rich, embodied, narrative-laden entity — is gone. What remains is not the self, but something more foundational: the sheer fact of awareness, the bare luminosity that precedes any particular content.
PS: The theatrical abuse of em dashes? That is pure, unfiltered human agency at work.