Thomas Metsinger, welcome to the show.

Thanks for inviting me.

What is the minimal, phenomenal experience project?

Well, I could give you a slightly longer history of it.

That starts with a paper in 2009 in Trans-Cognitive Sciences,

where we did these experiments where we tried to have subjects identify themselves with an avatar,

seeing their own body from behind.

And then we asked ourselves the question, if that illusion works, the whole body illusion.

I'm sure many of your viewers have heard of it.

There's a popular science book called The Ego Tunnel where I describe all this.

The question was, what is actually the thing that jumps from the physical body into the virtual body, if the illusion works.

What's that sense of selfie identification?

And that led to the question, what is minimal phenomenal selfhood?

So we wrote this paper where we defined the simplest sense of conscious self-experience, which is basically location in space,

location in time, and a perceptual, only sensory perspectival model of reality, for instance,

centered on the eyes. Interestingly, our research showed that agency,

mental agency, guiding your attention or bodily agency,

are not necessary conditions for this simplest form of selfhood.

Okay, after this was over, in my group we always discussed, what else can you subtract from minimal phenomenal self-hood?

What could you take away without having a cessation of conscious experience, without fainting?

That led to the concept of MPE, minimal phenomenal experience, which actually not I have invented,

but my research assistant at the time, Jennifer Wind, who is now at Monash University in Melbourne.

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