THEORY-1295: Metzinger 2024 calls consciousness without an egoic self or first-person perspective "empirically established" on the strength of retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators, while its own methods chapter grants that a remembered report of a selfless state is "highly dubious" evidence that the state was selfless when it occurred, and leaves that problem open

Source

Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943: introduction, pp. xvi–xxvi; chapter 2, pp. 12–20; chapter 31, pp. 416–418; chapter 34, pp. 457–467. Read in NOTE-1499. Metzinger (2020), LIT-1946, p. 15, read in full in NOTE-1498.

What was actually shown

The data. An online survey from early 2020 in five languages had 1,403 usable respondents from 57 countries. More than 77% meditated regularly, and the mean age was 52. Each rated 92 items, and 841 gave usable free-text reports of past episodes “in which the quality of pure awareness was particularly salient and/or one which you can remember particularly clearly” (pp. xvi, 17–18). The instruction defined the target as all experiences “in which there is an ‘awareness of awareness itself’” (p. xvi). No physiological or behavioural measure was taken.

What the methods chapter grants (pp. 12–20):

• Self-selection into the reporting group, and a sample “highly unlikely to be representative” (pp. 14, 20).
• “Embodied theory contamination”: practitioners’ belief systems “act as unconscious priors” and “may have both introduced a self-selection bias into our sample and biased the questionnaire responses” (pp. 16–17).
• A pull toward impressive episodes, and “response drift” (pp. 17–18).
• Unreliable recall of episodes “possibly even decades ago” (p. 18).
• The grouping of reports is “not a truly systematic qualitative analysis at all” and reflects the author’s own intuitions (pp. 12–14).
• The autobiographical-memory problem. “The respondents’ claims that they themselves consciously experienced a selfless state at the very time when it actually occurred are highly dubious from a methodological perspective.” A selfless state might be “stored and later retrieved in an autobiographical format, as a post hoc mnemonic misrepresentation”. “The specific philosophical question about MPE and autobiographical memory remains open” (p. 19). The 2020 paper goes further: the content of a full-absorption episode “cannot be reported”, and only entry and exit are remembered (LIT-1946, p. 15).
• Reports that an episode was “not an experience” do not show that it was not one, nor that it was (the C-fallacy and its mirror, p. 417).

What the summary says (pp. 457–459, 466–467). “Now that full-absorption episodes, nonegoic self-awareness, and nondual modes of consciousness are empirically established phenomena, we can see that minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) is not subjective and having a first-person perspective is not a necessary condition for consciousness to occur” (p. 457). The strong reading of “subjective” “is false” (p. 459). “Subpersonal but nonetheless conscious self-knowledge from the zero-person perspective does exist—this is what empirical evidence shows” (pp. 458–459). “We now have the first systematic empirical evidence for a conscious and genuinely nonsubjective form of self-knowledge” (p. 467).

The summary does restate the memory point. The episodes’ quality “may later become integrated with some long-term self-model”, which “via its subject/object grammar, retrospectively imports a fictitious first-person perspective” (pp. 466–467). But it reads that point as explaining away the selfhood in the reports. The methods chapter had read it as undermining the reports’ evidence that the episode was selfless. The same mechanism serves both readings, and the book gives no way to tell them apart.

What could have come out otherwise. The methods chapter could have answered the memory problem, for instance with reports taken at the end of a session, which it recommends (p. 18), or with a measure taken during the episode. It does neither.

What this does not say

• That selfless consciousness does not occur. The reports are consistent with it. What the book lacks is evidence that tells it apart from a selfless description, applied afterwards, of an episode that had a self, or of a gap.
• That the survey is worthless. Its factor structure and its corpus of descriptions are data about how practitioners describe these episodes. That is what THEORY-870 found for the TM study as well: evidence about reports.
• That the problem is unique to this book. It is the performative worry THEORY-063’s promote_when already names, and the précis named it too. This book states it most fully and then sets it aside in its conclusions.

Connections

• THEORY-063. Its promote_when asks for selfless states “established by methods that meet its own performative worry about reports of selfless experience”. This book, the largest body of such reports, does not meet it, and says so at p. 19.
• THEORY-870 and THEORY-866. The same pattern in the TM study and in the expert-text synthesis: reported contentless or selfless states, with report as the only access.
• QUESTION-048. A clean case of what report alone can and cannot establish about experience as opposed to its later description.