The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness—Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports
Authors: Metzinger Thomas 
Published: February 2025

THE ELEPHANT AND THE BLIND: The Experience of Pure Consciousness--Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports by Thomas Metzinger. MIT Press, 2024. 648 pages. Paperback; $80.00. ISBN: 9780262547109. *What is consciousness and how can science fruitfully study it? In this book, Thomas Metzinger proposes that the experience of pure awareness occurs without "subjectivity" and will help science uncover the "core causal factors" underlying consciousness. Science can then build on this minimal model for a more comprehensive theory. However, consciousness studies face a major problem: "Three decades after the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was founded in 1994, we still do not even know (or cannot agree on) what precisely it is that needs to be explained" (p. xiv). Toward a solution, Metzinger contends that pure awareness is the simplest kind of experience, namely, the experience of awareness as such. With this hypothesis, science might verify whether pure awareness is the phenomenal-neurological boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. Believing that meditation helps people access pure awareness, Metzinger surveyed over 1,400 meditators who have experienced this phenomenon, labelling this the minimal phenomenal experience project (MPEP) and, in this book, reports more than 500 of the 841 narratives from the project. The result: he identifies phenomenal markers that help neuroscience map the causal correlates common to all conscious experiences. *Grouping meditative reports by chapter, Metzinger describes experiences of awareness that come from diverse meditative practices. Though he includes statistical analysis (from the MPEP), he concentrates on filtering reports by qualitative criteria. In each chapter, he selects reports from the narrative part of the survey and then groups them into phenomenal categories. Metzinger investigates over thirty experiences, some of which overlap with ordinary wakeful life (e.g., peace). Others (e.g., luminosity) are less familiar. Several are even difficult to describe without paradoxical metaphor (e.g., timeless change). Intended for a general audience, the chapters are readable and, typically, brief. Since jargon is unavoidable, a glossary clarifies new and abstract concepts. Other virtues of the book: Metzinger proposes a methodology for neuroscience to isolate and reproduce pure awareness, and he also suggests philosophical lessons about how pure awareness informs the theory of evidence. Overall, his reflections might inspire psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy with new phenomenal concepts. *As his main contribution, Metzinger introduces minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) as a trustworthy way of investigating consciousness. Such experiences are the simplest kind --causally and experientially--that we in fact have. In their narrative responses, meditators report either no discernible mental contents (i.e., an experience without a noticeable object) or contents "along with the deeper nature of consciousness" (p. xiii). According to Metzinger, pure awareness is a candidate MPE. He speculates that pure awareness might be the experience of the capacity to know--but without any known object. In his scientific aim to isolate MPE, Metzinger makes two methodological assumptions: (1) Introspective knowledge defines the target for the scientific investigation of consciousness; and (2) if a state is experientially simple, its neurological basis must be correspondingly simple. Without these assumptions, his study cannot help science uncover the neuro-correlates of conscious experience. *Metzinger weaves three major themes throughout his book. First, pure awareness occurs as a global way of being conscious, without discernible contents, and, at times, as a state with ordinary experiences as contents. In full-absorption episodes, for example, meditators report being conscious but without thought and perception, without a localized body-experience, and without felt agency and self-awareness. Meditative experiences in which one is fully absorbed are ineffable but later reportable. If they are states of pure awareness, the only reportable feature is the quality of awareness. As a state combined with recognizable contents, pure awareness transforms the meditator's perspective; for example, with heightened senses, one feels as though one sees the world as it is for the first time. The visual contents and the quality of awareness are both present. As its global modes and states suggest, if pure awareness involves the most generic phenomenal quality, then experiences are irreducible to contents specific to objects and their properties. *Second, pure awareness alters meditators' familiar embodied experience as thinking, active selves. Awareness, for example, widens as though the body expands. Bodily boundaries dissolve, attenuate, or form the limit of awareness, leading to a felt spatial expansion and oneness with everything. Senses merge, and the self-aware subject disappears. In particular, there is neither a spatiotemporal frame of self-reference nor the experience of a localized self who knows distinct objects. Ordinary wakeful experiences with their objects seem neither internal nor external. Everything but consciousness itself has a dreamlike virtuality. In addition, an impersonal observer--a "bigger" presence than the self--knows what one once knew as his or her wakeful self. Such "virtual" and "nondual" experiences, Metzinger believes, show that the purely aware are not self-aware. If so, being conscious doesn't necessarily involve self-awareness. In practice, a meditator can't mindfully observe the experience of pure awareness, which is just something one falls into and later recalls. Detractors might reply that meditators still have a perspective and are peripherally aware of themselves but without attending to themselves.1 *Third, pure awareness combines with an experience of knowledge that is, given the above, independent of self-awareness. Based on this, Metzinger contends that the brain simulates our self-awareness, which is really a "complex hallucination" (pp. 80-81, 302-6, 353-71). Put differently, our internal "agent model" is a misleading "hologram," not a mental subject with self-knowledge. The "I" who thinks, perceives, plans, and acts is a fiction. Apparent experiences of the self don't merely fall short of knowledge; the purely aware experience their agent model as a representation. This internal modeling is normally transparent: a "virtual self appears, and it seems to be self-aware. Apparently, it really knows that it knows but the virtuality itself, the ‘as if' quality is not experienced" (pp. 302-3). As the brain makes mere possibilities look real, a world outside us seems to appear and we experience "ourselves" so reliably that we have no experience of ourselves as a model. *Metzinger eliminates the self altogether from his ontology, a position that seems inconsistent with Christian teaching. The Bible addresses the nature of consciousness indirectly by assuming that we are moral agents and so capable of rational choice and personal knowledge.2 We are significantly free--not only responsible for our actions but, at times, also worthy of praise and blame. We can, for example, resist our strongest urges for the sake of doing the right thing. A degree of free will justifies praise and blame--and, therefore, the possibility of reward, punishment, and atonement. Moreover, friendship with God is our greatest well-being. Friendships with good people and the shared worthy goals they presuppose involve self-knowledge and agency. If, as Metzinger claims, we don't have the mental properties that define personal agency and knowledge, Christian teachings that presuppose moral agency are false. *Despite Metzinger's careful research, I see no reason to accept his denial of the self, which implies that self-knowledge is merely apparent. His appeal to hallucinations is unconvincing for several reasons.3 We can be fooled by non-veridical experiences, such as hallucinations. I can't always tell when I'm hallucinating. However, I can discover that I'm hallucinating X by investigating how X appears. Even if I can't now distinguish a hallucination from a veridical experience, it doesn't follow that they are indistinguishable and, therefore, the same experience. Moreover, hallucinations present properties--properties that the objects we hallucinate apparently have. If these properties are I-properties (e.g., purposes), they can't exist on their own. Whatever has them is an active, viewing subject--I or you. In addition, if meditators know their self-model as a model, they are still self-aware. No one can be aware of a model as such without also being aware of the thing modeled. *Why take meditative reports seriously, especially ones with religious framing that filter the experience? In answering this question, Metzinger implies that we can distinguish religious filters from the experience itself and thus sift the experience from its interpretation. After all, meditative reports are descriptively rich and arise out of diverse traditions. In his epilogue, however, Metzinger applies his findings about pure awareness to ethics and rejects the religious perspectives through which many meditators interpret their experiences. He believes that an ethic without religious belief, especially belief in the afterlife, is openminded. But without justifying his naturalism, Metzinger's stance remains ideology. Religious or not, ideology helps us integrate our experiences with our lives and, if true, clarifies those experiences. Religion doesn't necessarily distort them--although Metzinger claims otherwise. *Often overlooked by Western science, Metzinger explores features of pure experience that alter how we think about consciousness, especially the way it relates to the body, knowledge, and the self. The book is well worth the read for all interested in the phenomenology and science of consciousness. *Notes *1Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), 99-100. *2See Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford University Press, 1989). *3See Walter Hopp, Phenomenology (Routledge, 2020). *Reviewed by Jonathan K. Metcalf, Department of Philosophy, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215.