Top 35 Thomas Metzinger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.”

— Thomas Metzinger

2. “The self is not a thing, but a process.”

— Thomas Metzinger

3. “When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.”

— Thomas Metzinger

4. “As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is “availability for introspective attention”: Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.”

— Thomas Metzinger

5. “The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.”

— Thomas Metzinger

6. “Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won’t be able to think clearly any more.”

— Thomas Metzinger

7. “At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.”

— Thomas Metzinger

8. “Virtual reality is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible – ideally, by creating a subjective sense of “presence” and full immersion in the user.”

— Thomas Metzinger

9. “Subjective time flows forward, the phenomenal self is embedded into this flow, an inner history unfolds. That it is why it is not a bubble, but a tunnel: There is movement in time.”

— Thomas Metzinger

10. “The main function of consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity.”

— Thomas Metzinger

11. “The most beautiful idea, perhaps, is that freedom and determinism can peacefully coexist: If our brains are causally determined in the right way, if they make us causally sensitive to moral considerations and rational arguments, then this very fact makes us free. Determinism and free will are compatible.”

— Thomas Metzinger

12. “Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.”

— Thomas Metzinger

13. “Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events. As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.”

— Thomas Metzinger

14. “Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.”

— Thomas Metzinger

15. “All attention is introspection.”

— Thomas Metzinger

16. “A 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 Metzinger

17. “I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.”

— Thomas Metzinger

18. “Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.”

— Thomas Metzinger

19. “Of 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 Metzinger

20. “Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.”

— Thomas Metzinger

21. “I 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 Metzinger

22. “Developing a consciousness culture has nothing to do with establishing a religion or a particular political agenda. On the contrary, a true consciousness culture will always be subversive, by encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own lives.”

— Thomas Metzinger

23. “As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.”

— Thomas Metzinger

24. “Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.”

— Thomas Metzinger

25. “You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.”

— Thomas Metzinger

26. “Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans, avoid risks, and treat our fellow human beings fairly – for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern ourselves.”

— Thomas Metzinger

27. “But it is also becoming evident that psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running.”

— Thomas Metzinger

28. “Conscious experience as such is an exclusively internal affair: Once all functional properties of your brain are fixed, the character of subjective experience is determined as well.”

— Thomas Metzinger

29. “As far as inner action is concerned, we are only rarely truly self-determined persons, for the major part of our conscious mental activity rather is an automatic, unintentional form of behavior on the subpersonal level.”

— Thomas Metzinger

30. “Speaking 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 Metzinger

31. “Retribution is really a stone age concept.”

— Thomas Metzinger

32. “The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like “subjectivity”.”

— Thomas Metzinger

33. “If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little “Think me!” and our mind begins to wander.”

— Thomas Metzinger

34. “Scientists who believe that their discipline will progressively eliminate all philosophical problems are simply fooling themselves. What science can contribute to is the elimination of false philosophical problems.”

— Thomas Metzinger

35. “As 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 Metzinger

36. “Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.”

— Thomas Metzinger

37. “Thinking isn’t something you do. Most of the time, it’s something that happens to you.”

— Thomas Metzinger

38. “Sleep is the little brother of death; it means letting go of the world.”

— Thomas Metzinger