Thomas Metzinger: The transparent avatar in your brain

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Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher. As of 2000 he holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation.

In his talk Thomas analyses the concept of self and presents it as a process that can be tricked. Our self model comes from the ownership of our body and which can even sense phantom limbs. He will describe the self process by means of a set of experiments and examples that the audience can try themselves. These examples show that we can identify ourselves with a virtual avatar as in the famous movie. The talk has been recorded at TEDxBarcelona on the 17th of May 2013. For more information please visit www.tedxbarcelona.com

[Video and text source: TEDx Talks YouTube channel]