(This is the updated 2025 edition)

To explain consciousness we must explain not just sensations but how a three-dimensional world is perceived without relying on an inner eye (or homunculus) that can make sense of depth cues etc. Both problems are tackled here as well as language, aesthetics and morality.

The text systematically and ruthlessly dismantles the apparent mechanism of the inner eye (or the homunculus) and shows how all thought and experience and the apparent individual point of view can be accounted for in terms of fundamental quanta of sensation, before going on to show how these remaining basic units of sensation are not (and cannot be) emergent phenomena but must be part of a field effect.

The strategy for the text is to systematically remove any and all conceptual need for a homunculus in the explanation of consciousness, and to scrutinize what must be the case for what remains.