Thomas Metzinger

Yes, it is true that conscious self-models first brought the experience of pleasure and joy into the physical universe—a universe where no such phenomena existed before. But it is also becoming evident that psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running. We can recognize this structure in ourselves, but we will never be able to escape it. We are this structure.

The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.

If you are smart, you may even begin to control their behavior by controlling their conscious states. If you successfully deceive them—if, say, you manage to install a false belief in their minds—then you have activated a virtual organ in another brain.

Yes, the self-model made us intelligent, but it certainly is not an example of intelligent design. It is the seed of subjective suffering. If the process that created the biological Ego Machine had been initiated by a person, that person would have to be described as cruel, maybe even diabolic. We were never asked if we wanted to exist, and we will never be asked whether we want to die or whether we are ready to do so. In particular, we were never asked if we wanted to live with this combination of genes and this type of body. Finally, we were certainly never asked if we wanted to live with this kind of a brain including this specific type of conscious experience. It should be high time for rebellion. But everything we know points to a conclusion that is simple but hard to come to terms with: Evolution simply happened—foresightless, by chance, without goal.

In the evolution of nervous systems, both the number of individual conscious subjects and the depth of their experiential states (that is, the wealth and variety of sensory and emotional nuances in which subjects could suffer) have been growing continuously, and this process has not yet ended. Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state.

Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.

Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning and embed it in a positive metacontext—it is the deeply human attempt to finally feel at home. It is a strategy to outsmart the hedonic treadmill. On an individual level, it seems to be one of the most successful ways to achieve a stable state—as good as or better than any drug so far discovered. Now science seems to be taking all this away from us. The emerging emptiness may be one reason for the current rise of religious fundamentalism, even in secular societies.

One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves.

Until we become happier beings than our ancestors were, we should refrain from any attempt to impose our mental structure on artificial carrier systems.

Everything we have learned about the transparency of phenomenal states clearly shows that “actual contact with reality” and “certainty” can be simulated too, and that nature has already done it in our brains by creating the Ego Tunnel.