Steven’s Lehar scrutiny:

“Suddenly I could see in my mind’s eye that the world I saw around me, including the picture of myself sitting in my chair, was merely an image generated inside my head, and therefore it could not be out in the world. In other words, out beyond the walls and floor and ceiling of the room I saw around me, was the inner surface of my true physical skull, and beyond that skull was an inconceivably immense remote external world, of which this world that was in my experience was merely a miniature virtual-reality replica”.

Lehar, S. (2013). In The world in your head a gestalt view of the mechanism of conscious experience. preface, Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group.

The essential reason behind this thought made by Lehar is that we’re actually little creatures that inhabit a miniature world model generated by the most complex piece of machinery in this known universe; the brain. We control the movements of the physical body through a dynamic internal replica of it, named as “sensory homunculus”, that could be thought of as a sophisticated interface that the brain utilizes to maintain a unified behavior of the entire body at once.

This brain representation directly corresponds with our phenomenology of the body. So, what we are, at least in terms of the content of our experiences, is the way in which this biological machine is performing fancy computational operations to understand its current condition within its environment, all this with the purpose of ensuring its own survival.

These kinds of insights act as potential fuel for a new, and non-trivial level within the philosophy of mind. Which may be seen either as a fascinating topic, or as a source of existential vertigo...

Painting made by Steven Lehar; Book: The Grand Illusion, by Steven Lehar. This Painting illustrates perfectly the concept of living within our own heads.