The Ego Tunnel
Thomas Metzinger · 2009
"The self is not a thing you have but a transparent model your brain constructs and mistakes for direct reality — an 'ego tunnel' you can never fully see because you're always inside it."
Metzinger's central metaphor is the ego tunnel: you look through a tunnel your brain constructs, seeing the world and yourself within it, but you can never see the tunnel itself — only through it. Your sense of being a continuous, unified self is not a thing stored somewhere in your brain; it's a perspective, a self-model, generated moment to moment and presented to you as if it were direct, unmediated reality rather than a construction.
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The Selfish Gene (and Memes)
"The gene, not the organism, is the true unit of natural selection — animals are 'survival machines' built by genes to replicate themselves, and culture spreads by an analogous unit Dawkins named the meme."