Thomas Metzinger (*1958 in Frankfurt am Main) was Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the  Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He is past president of the German Cognitive Science Society and of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the  Barbara Wengeler Foundation (2019-2024), and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2018 to 2020 Metzinger worked as a member of the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. In 2021 he was awarded the Pufendorf-Medal, in 2022  he was elected into the German National Academy of Science.

In the English language, he has edited two collections on consciousness  ("Conscious Experience", Imprint Academic, 1995;  "Neural Correlates of Consciousness", MIT Press, 2000) and published one major scientific monograph ( "Being No One - The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity", MIT Press, 2003). In 2009, he published a popular book, which addresses a wider audience and discusses the ethical, cultural and social consequences of consciousness research ( "The Ego Tunnel - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self"). Important recent Open Access collections are  Open MIND at open-mind.net (2015, with Jennifer Windt),  Philosophy and Predictive Processing at predictive-mind.net (2017, with Wanja Wiese), and Radical Disruptions of Self-Consciousness (2020, with Raphaël Millière). In 2024, he published a major OA-monograph with the MIT Press titled  The Elephant and the Blind.