How the Universe makes us think we exist inside a body

Perhaps a stupid question but will explain. Why is it always me in the picture when I look at myself in the mirror? 

Well obviously its because I am the one looking. It cannot be any other way. When I look in the mirror, because it is me looking, it must also be me that is in the mirror.

But why is this?

Again this sounds like a silly question. But let us examine some of the higher knowledge we have.

We know there is only one world. We know that we all occupy the same world. And we know that everything is made in that world by that world.

Looking in the mirror we know that the mirror, the light, the body reflected and the body doing the seeing are all made and belong in this world. And this is the same world as everyone else.

This idea that we are someone locked in a body that is like a room with a window out of which we look is wrong. There is no secret self that is somehow separate from the world, locked away. Every part of us exists in the same world as everyone else.

So given this what means that I always see myself in the mirror and you always see yourself. It is--despite the fact we suspect otherwise--that we are somehow trapped in the unique experiences that we have and those make us completely separate from other people.

Whichever way we look at it, it seems that because we see through these eyes, what we see must be us.

But this does not mean we are trapped because we have not yet decided what "I" am.

You see for "me" to see through my eyes, I must be different from my eyes.

And for me to see "myself" in the mirror I must be different from what I see in the mirror!!

For me to feel trapped in this body I must be different from this body.

This means I do not actually see myself in the mirror!

I see the body in which I exist.

So it almost looks like you could open the lid, perhaps open the skull, and let me out.

But the problem is if we examine our deep knowledge again is there is no separate self in here. I have never and no one has ever seen a "self."

There is some idea that a self is a "soul." Not that long ago they were weighing bodies at death to see if the weight changed as the soul left. This is a very old idea that the self and the body are separate.

And returning to the top, while we might think that "I" is separate from the body we don't expect to ever look in a mirror and see someone else.

But actually how would we know. Suppose my eyes were stretched and put in someone else's head. when I looked in the mirror I would see someone else. But it wouldn't quite work because there would be the nerves going into the eye sockets and when I talked and moved it would move a body off screen. But then we can imagine I have my brain put into someone else's body and the nerves all connected. Then I could walk to the mirror open "my" eyes and see someone else. This really lends weight to the idea that I am separate from my body. And actually we really can look in a mirror and see someone else.

And on an aside we get a relativity point here. We only say it is someone else because we are "used" to it being "me" and with the sudden change and the person looking different we get a shock and call it someone else. But how long before this "other" person becomes me? In fact what we see in the mirror is not me, and never has been me, it is just the person we have got used to seeing when we look in the mirror and we only notice that were they to suddenly change.

So we have already demolished the starting observation that the person we see when we look in the mirror is "me." This me just means the "usual" person that is there.

But I wanted to go in a different direction. Let us say that all the "processing" needed to see someone and think about it and decide that this person is "me" is all done in the body that is looking in the mirror. It is a loop. Whenever a machine that can process vision and has a social concept of people so that it can decide that one of the people is itself, looks in the mirror it will always see the machine that is doing the processing (assuming no long cables or optic nerves to mean processing is happening off screen).

But we know that there is more to the world than just this machine in front of the mirror. And this machine knows that too.

This is the key observation  here. "me" is actually a greater thing than the machine that has decided it knows itself.

Knowing yourself is just looking in the mirror and puzzling over how this machine works. But that is just a part of the whole world. And this whole world can do any number of machines looking in the mirror puzzling over how each of them works and who they are.

So this is how the sense of being trapped happens. The machine (our body or any similar) when it looks in the mirror can obviously get caught in the loop and trap of thinking about itself. And while this seems profound as though we can reach out and touch an entity that we believe is a separate thing called "ourself" this is actually an illusion. This "ourself" is really just a part of the whole universe which has the power to make machines that can get really involved in themselves. The magic lies in the power of the universe to make self absorbed machine, rather than the experience of being a machine that can focus on itself.

The sense of being "inside" a body is actually only possible because of the universe making a body that can look at itself and wonder what is inside.

In that experience of being "inside" a body we are actually looking at the power of the universe!