https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument
It's really neat actually been puzzling this Homunculus one as long as the Solipsism one. But its really easy in principle.
When we see a distant mountain we think it is far away and we are here looking at it.
If we use a bit of science though we can see a flaw in this almost ubiquitous idea. Close our eyes and the mountain disappears. Hmm something going on. We can show that light must enter the eye for the mountain to be seen. So that means when we actually see the mountain "far away", the light has already entered our eye and the mountain has *already* been seen. That is obvious: for us to see the mountain at all far away it has already been seen. You can't see what hasn't been seen.
So what is the use of this bit we tag on of "me" at the centre looking at it? A Homunculus at the centre of the world waiting for a second look at all this. It turns out this is irrelevant to the mountain, it is just a story we apply to explain the process, but it has nothing to do with the actual seeing. The mountain is the actual seeing! Kind of obvious, but also perplexing. How bad and inexact are our habitual narratives. and then we look at the films and NEWS and then people fight.
This links exactly to Douglas Harding's "Headless Way" where we notice that we mix up our experience and our thoughts about it in a big chowder of confusion importantly giving reality to thoughts about our "self" which is really only a plastic marker in a mental map. The real self turns up in places like making mountains appear. So people say things like "I" am the seeing, which is slightly better that "I am the seer" (which is a subtle projection of the homunculus story).
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