- Lived:
- Born 1958, Frankfurt am Main, Germany · works in Mainz
- Tradition:
- Contemporary philosophy of mind, in permanent conversation with neuroscience
- The Big Idea:
- There is no such thing as a self. What exists is a self-model — a simulation your brain runs and mistakes for a little inner someone — and understanding this changes what we owe to every creature, and every machine, that can suffer.
- In their words:
- "no one ever was or had a self" — the claim at the heart of his major work, stated in six words.
- If you remember one thing:
- You are not a thing that has experiences. You are an experience the brain is having — and it feels like a "you" because the brain's self-model is invisible to the person it creates.