Marcello Ghin reviews Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity by Thomas Metzinger: “The notion of consciousness has been suspected of being too vague for being a topic of scientific investigation. Recently, consciousness has become more interesting in the light of new neuroscientific imaging studies. Scientists from all over the world are searching for neural correlates of consciousness. However, finding the neural basis is not enough for a scientific explanation of conscious experience. After all, we are still facing the ‘hard problem’, as David Chalmers dubbed it: why are those neural processes accompanied by conscious experience at all? Maybe we can reformulate the question in this way: Which constraints does a system have to satisfy in order to generate conscious experience? Being No One is an attempt to give an answer to the latter question. To be more precise: it is an attempt to give an answer to the question of how information processing systems generate the conscious experience of being someone.” —human-nature.com
