Thomas Metzinger (2003), Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (A Bradford Book) — DOI 10.7551/mitpress/1551.001.0001.
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: author, title, MIT Press, 2003. Crossref gives the subtitle “The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”, carried in the title here.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not a reading. For the theory itself, see LIT-450.
- The publisher’s description, in part: “According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a ‘transparent self-model.’” It “draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is”, and asks “How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world?”
- Contents (Crossref chapter DOIs, with pages): Questions (1–12); Tools I (13–106); The Representational Deep Structure of Phenomenal Experience (107–212); Neurophenomenological Case Studies I (213–264); Tools II (265–298); The Representational Deep Structure of the Phenomenal First-Person Perspective (299–428); Neurophenomenological Case Studies II (429–546); Preliminary Answers (547–634); References (635–662); Name Index (663–670); Subject Index (671–700).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of selfhood, as the book-length statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity. No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
Unavailable because the book was not read. The theory is in the record
through Metzinger’s own short statement, “Self models” (LIT-450,
read in full), which cites this book for its ten constraints on
phenomenality (ch. 3) and its analyses of altered and pathological
self-models (ch. 7). Where the book bears on the record is set out there
and in its NOTE: against Minsky’s self-models (LIT-432), against Dennett’s
narrative self (LIT-442), and on the question whether a machine with a
self-model has a self. metaphysics is carried for the book’s thesis that
there are no selves, only self-models, which is an ontological claim.