Where is the homunculus?

At its most basic, our experience of thinking — which we normally assume is happening somewhere inside our head, brain or mind — is simply another phenomenon arising in awareness alongside everything else we experience.

A thought appears. A sound appears. The room appears. A bodily sensation appears. They are different kinds of phenomena, but in immediate experience they are all appearances in awareness. The familiar distinction between an inner world of thought and an outer world of things may be useful for navigating everyday life, but under closer inspection that boundary is surprisingly difficult to find.

Once this is directly noticed, it becomes difficult to put thought back into its customary bottle, like a genie, and locate it securely somewhere “inside me”.

So what is the genesis of a thought?

The Phenomenology of Thinking