[1]
Strictly speaking, the experience is not of being no one, since there is no one to be. Rather it is an experience we cannot help but take to be of being someone, even though there is no entity causing the experience. There is no substantial Cartesian, or bodily, or neural, entity that sustains the properties ascribed by Allport. Thus part of Metzinger’s project is to explain why we feel as though we are substantial entities.
[2]
In other words I take the strong view advocated by Murphy. The ontology of the mind is the ontology of cognitive science. The reason is that only with the correct theory of cognitive architecture in place can we understand how neural processes implement the cognitive processes whose operations we experience as personal-level phenomenology. That personal-level phenomenology provides the raw material for intuitive or folk explanations that abstract from cognitive and neural realization. But that abstraction is precisely why, as Halligan and Marshall once memorably said, in the absence of a suitably constrained cognitive model, psychiatry will be consumed by “the expensive and extensive search for non existent entities” (Halligan & Marshall 1996, p. 6). I take the view that mechanistic (in the sense of neuroscientific) and phenomenological (based on reflection on the nature of experience) explanation are not independent projects. One could have a purely personal-level phenomenological ontology of mind. But the fact that such ontologies mislead about the sources of psychiatric disorder is a reason to search for an integrative theory. But the only way neuroscience can explain experience is via a detailed computational, cognitive theory.
[3]
There is an interesting debate to be had here. On the views of e.g., Damasio and Bechara affective feelings are not metacognitive but experiences produced by lower level or first order processes associated with metacognitive processes (such as planning and decision making). Proust refers to feelings generated by metacognitive processes. On the view proposed here the AIC metarepresents the significance of first order bodily information (e.g., visceral or tonic muscular state) in the context of self-relevant metacognition. It allows the subject to experience not just body state but the relevance of that body state.