![simulacra 2 the girl who loved me simulacra 2 the girl who loved me](https://images.148apps.com/2019/12/102146/268505/simulacra-2-ios-1.png)
Then, in 2003, he heard from a Swiss neuroscientist named Olaf Blanke, who had learned how to give people out-of-body experiences when they were fully awake. Eventually, they ceased altogether he set the subject aside and became an eminent philosopher of mind. Some internal mental system must function as an invisible, unconscious set dresser, making an itch feel like an itch, coloring the sky blue and the grass green.Īs Metzinger developed these ideas, he also had fewer out-of-body experiences. Metzinger started to think about how such a model might be constructed. could be like visiting the set at night, when it wasn’t being used. Having read Johnson-Laird, he’d begun to wonder whether reality, as we experience it, might be a mental stage set-a representation of the world, rather than the world itself. “These experiences are too realistic!” Later, he decided that Blackmore was right. “No fucking way!” Metzinger remembers thinking. During a heated dinner conversation in Tübingen, the psychologist Susan Blackmore, who had studied O.B.E.s, suggested to Metzinger that he hadn’t actually floated around his room: “You were probably moving around your mental map, in your world model,” she said. If you want to know whether a rug will go with your sofa, you don’t deduce the answer-you imagine it, by moving furniture around on a mental stage set. In 1983, the psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird had published a book called “ Mental Models,” in which he argued that people often think not by applying logical rules but by manipulating models of the world in their minds. Metzinger could find no way to produce O.B.E.s on demand, or to study them systematically.
![simulacra 2 the girl who loved me simulacra 2 the girl who loved me](https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/712730/ss_0ec65eac57fbb72e5c9b606ee92d1a94cd57c538.1920x1080.jpg)
The salt had no effect, and the ketamine resulted in hours of unpleasant phantasmagoric hallucinations. Before a minor surgery, he persuaded his anesthesiologist to alter his medication so that he could wake up early enough to experience the effects of the drug ketamine, which is famous for inducing out-of-body experiences. Following the advice of New Age “astral travellers,” he stopped drinking liquids at noon, stared at a glass of water in his kitchen, and then slept with salt in his cheek, hoping to travel back to the glass at night. Metzinger began experimenting on himself. One night, he tried to use the light switch (it didn’t work) he decided to fly through the window and visit his girlfriend, but woke up instead.
![simulacra 2 the girl who loved me simulacra 2 the girl who loved me](http://shamrockroseaussies.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/DSC_0104.10902513_std.jpg)
(Many religious traditions hold that there is a “subtle body,” or immaterial version of the self, capable of travelling through space.) Meanwhile, on occasional evenings, he floated around his room. He learned that between eight and fifteen per cent of the population reports having had an “O.B.E.”-perhaps during the night, or after surgery-and that, for millennia, people have seen in such experiences evidence for various mystical theories of the soul. Metzinger began reading about out-of-body experiences. Could materialism be wrong? Could consciousness exist immaterially, outside of the body? He admonished himself: “How arrogant I have been!” He was, therefore, doubly shocked by his out-of-body experience, which had seemed irrevocably real. Immersing himself in the work of the Anglophone philosophers, he’d eventually become convinced that his soul was made by his brain.
![simulacra 2 the girl who loved me simulacra 2 the girl who loved me](https://www.jonpeddie.com/images/uploads/Simul-002.png)
In Metzinger’s department, such theories were denounced as anti-human and “proto-fascist.” Metzinger considered himself a radical-he had waist-length hair, and was proud to have been teargassed while protesting the U.S. In Britain and America, philosophers, computer scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists were working together to reconceive the mind as a purely physical system created by the brain. During the postwar years, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had made the university’s Institute for Social Research-the Frankfurt School-a center of neo-Marxist thought, and the campus remained a politically radical place. Only much later did he realize that the breathing had been his.Īt the time, in the early nineteen-eighties, Metzinger was a philosophy student researching the mind-body problem at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität. He heard someone else breathing and, in a panic, looked around for an intruder. Gazing out into the room, he was both amazed and afraid. He tried to force the arm to move, and, somehow, this shifted him up and out of his body, so that he seemed to be floating above himself. He tried to scratch it, but couldn’t-his arm seemed paralyzed. Then he awoke, feeling an itch on his back. After a long day of yoga and meditation, he had a slice of cake and fell asleep. He was on a ten-week meditation retreat in the Westerwald, a mountainous area near his home, in Frankfurt. Thomas Metzinger had his first out-of-body experience when he was nineteen. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.