This is a radical rethinking of the nature of consciousness. "The Ego Tunnel", a major work from one of the brightest of the new generation of philosophers of mind, proposes a simple yet radical rethinking of the nature of consciousness and a fascinating and controversial exploration of what it implies. We're used to thinking of the self's relation to the world as a dyad-the inner me as opposed to the outer world. This model assumes that what we're perceiving when we experience the world is actually the world. It's almost impossible to escape a sort of naive realism when you employ this model, since the alternative is that the world outside yourself is a dream. Thomas Metzinger's model, however, based on the increasingly sophisticated and bizarre findings of neuroscience, is different. There is an outside world and an inner, unconscious mind, but we directly perceive neither. Instead, both our outward perceptions and our inward consciousness are a kind of interface, a membrane, between the mind and the world. Everything that we experience is 'a virtual self in a virtual reality'. This idea leads to a number of implications, scientific, ethical and pharmacological. If the interface is not 'real' then why and how did it evolve? How does the mind construct it? What does it mean to manipulate it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy and moral accountability, and if not, how can we retain institutions that assume all of these things? "The Ego Tunnel" is an indispensable guide to a new era when the science of the mind may displace evolution as the most controversial of the sciences.

本书将狭义认知语言学定义为“坚持体验哲学观，以身体经验和认知为出发点，以概念结构和意义研究为中心，着力寻求语言事实背后的认知方式，并通过认知方式和知识结构等对语言作出统一解释的、新兴的、跨领域的学科”，并以此为主线，将定义中提及的主要观点，特别是对诸如感知体验、范畴化、认知模型（包括CM、ICM、ECM、心智空间）、意象图式、隐喻转喻、识解等认知方式，逐一展开论述。
狭义认知语言追求用有限的认知方式对语言各个层面作出统一解释，包括语音、词汇、词法、句法、构造、乃至语篇（首次尝试运用这些认知方式来解释语篇的生成、连贯和理解）。本书还将体验哲学和认知语言学的基本原理扩展应用于翻译理论和实践的研究。