Metzinger, T. (2020). Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(I), 7. doi:10.33735/phimisci.2020.I.46.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-1498.
- MPE is defined by subtraction from minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke and Metzinger 2009, LIT-1274). It lacks MPS and every egoic self-consciousness, time and a spatial frame (p. 2). It is “aperspectival: no epistemic agent model” (p. 11).
- Wakefulness is the phenomenal property. Tonic alertness is the functional one, and arousal the physical one. “An organism can be tonically alert without knowing that it is alert: Consciousness is knowing that one is alert” (p. 33).
- MPE “definitely has representational content” (p. 38). It is “non-egoic self-modelling” (p. 36), a model of the organism’s epistemic capacities. Its epistemic subject “simply is the organism or conscious system as a whole” (p. 27).
- MPE lacks even a phenomenal quality of oneness. Its space has “neither centre nor periphery” and “lacks the phenomenal quality of singularity or numerical identity”, so “non-oneness” is added to “non-duality” (p. 13).
- A full-absorption episode cannot itself be reported, “because the self-referential mechanisms of forming an autobiographical memory are suspended”. Only entering and leaving it can be remembered (p. 15).
Standing in the record
Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-11-01, for the evidence-for-experience line. It supplies the concept that LIT-1354 assumes. It also bears on THEORY-063’s “selfless snapshot”. That was a selfless world experienced as one, and here the minimal case is selfless and not experienced as one. Read with Metzinger 2024 (LIT-1943), which develops the same account at book length with survey data. No instruction for machine-learning practice.