In an era when humanity is losing its dignity, how can we preserve our self-respect? We need a new guiding principle to help us face up to the planetary crisis. The old model of continuous economic growth, driven by greed, envy, and the pursuit of dominance, is leading us into global catastrophe. There are many reasons why, but the most obvious is the close correlation between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. We need to be honest with ourselves Realistically, our options are already limited to damage control and intelligent disaster management. Intellectual integrity, compassion, and a particular kind of inner awareness are urgently needed to cultivate mental and political resilience. The concept of a "culture of consciousness" is the starting point for a new debate. We need more compassion and radical self-respect For more than thirty years, we have been failing with our eyes wide open. In addition to our lack of self-respect and our lack of compassion for future generations, a lack of cultural creativity has been one of the main causes of the looming climate crisis: we have been unable to leave the old values behind and create alternative ways of living. But replacing old values with new ways of life is precisely what is needed to create a cultural context that will let us exit the growth model. We need a culture of consciousness that works at both the individual and the societal levels. This book offers a path towards it. We need a radical new culture of consciousness "Many of us have little compassion and no respect for the people and other sentient beings who will inhabit this planet after us. As a result, we will soon no longer be able to take ourselves seriously as rational beings, because for decades we have deliberately ignored empirical facts and organised our own self-deception at the political level. The climate catastrophe will therefore also lead us to recognise ourselves as a failing species, and the loss of our dignity will result in a historically unprecedented kind of suffering. We need a radical new Bewusstseinskultur." Thomas Metzinger

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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.