From Phenomenology to Architecture: Three Questions Raised by Metzinger’s Pure Awareness
Thomas Metzinger is one of the most interesting philosophers working on consciousness today. His The Ego Tunnel offered one of the clearest and most influential accounts of the self as a model rather than an independent entity. In The Elephant and the Blind, he takes another ambitious step: instead of starting from ordinary consciousness and explaining away the self, he examines reports of some of the most minimal conscious states people describe.
The book brings together more than 500 experiential reports from meditators and examines what Metzinger calls Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE) – states described in terms of pure awareness, witnessing, ego dissolution, nondual awareness, and radically reduced phenomenal content.
I have not worked through Metzinger’s books in full myself. What follows comes from discussing these ideas extensively, reading analyses and reviews of his work, and looking more closely at the specific claims and concepts relevant to this question. So I am not presenting this as a comprehensive critique of Metzinger. I am interested in something narrower: what happens when phenomenological descriptions are turned into explanations of the underlying architecture.
That distinction seems important. A report of an experience can be accurate without its interpretation of the underlying mechanism being accurate. Someone can reliably report that there was no self, no object, or even no experience. The interesting question is what kind of process could produce such a report – and whether the phenomenological description itself tells us what the underlying architecture actually was.
This is also why I find Metzinger’s work so valuable. The reports themselves are not something I want to explain away. On the contrary, they provide an unusually rich set of observations about what consciousness can look like when many of its familiar features disappear.
Reading the discussion from this perspective, I noticed three places where Metzinger’s phenomenological descriptions and his proposed explanations seem to pull in different directions.
Observations
1) Metzinger argues that there is no ontological “I” or subject – the “zero-person” perspective. Yet when he describes the state as “awareness knowing itself”, he uses relational language whose structure implicitly reinstates a knower and something known. In other words, the subject may have disappeared from his ontology, but it seems to reappear in the structure of the relation he uses to explain the state.
2) Metzinger seems to equivocate between absence and minimality. He takes seriously practitioners’ reports that “this was not an experience,” but then classifies the same class of states as Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE). Yet “no experience” and “minimal experience” are not two descriptions of the same quantity at different scales; they are categorically different claims. The former says that the phenomenon is absent, while the latter says that it is present at a minimal level. The phenomenological report alone cannot establish that transition.
3) Metzinger also seems to introduce relational structure into a state he describes as radically unstructured. He describes MPE as lacking subject-object duality, yet simultaneously characterizes it as an active “epistemic process” in which the system maintains a “self-model of its own epistemic openness.” But a self-model is already a representational relation: something is modeling something, even if what is modeled is only the system’s own epistemic openness. So, if MPE genuinely lacks the relevant subject-object or representational structure, it remains unclear what exactly is being modeled in this supposed “knowing.” If, on the other hand, such a self-model is present, then the state is not as structurally empty as the phenomenological description suggests.
Explanations
1) If we define the self as an active accountable process – a verb, not a noun (a move Metzinger partially makes) – “awareness knowing itself” then describes a recursive process without an ontological subject. The contradiction dissolves as soon as this one definitional step is taken – the step Metzinger did not take in full manner. When the process is running - “I” present. When it stops - “I” is absent.
2) If we define experience as the current unified state of statements (S) and algorithms (A), then practitioners’ reports of an absence of phenomenal content – minimal S – need not imply an absence of experience altogether. The very fact that they can report it indicates that A continued operating. There was no absence of experience; there was an absence of content.
3) If we distinguish content structure from architectural structure, then MPE can have minimal or empty S while A remains active. What Metzinger calls a “self-model of epistemic openness” can then be understood as algorithmic monitoring of the absence of structured input. A “radically unstructured state” that simultaneously maintains a self-model would be contradictory only if “unstructured” referred to architectural structure. Once content structure and architectural structure are distinguished, the apparent contradiction disappears.
Of course, a full account requires complete scope, but I hope even this partial analysis reveals some basic structures.
A Further Question
If the me/not-me boundary is an internal abstraction that a process uses to model itself, then changes in experience may have at least two independent dimensions: the boundary can expand or contract, and it can become sharper or more diffuse. This gives us four potentially distinct phenomena – expansion, contraction, sharpening, and blurring of the self-boundary – and, importantly, their possible combinations. It would be interesting to revisit the practitioners’ reports from precisely this perspective.
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