the roamer@econads @amiserabilist @Gorfram @Alice @glasspusher @Lazarou
:-) Excellent, must get that Stephen King book!
There's a similar take in a book by Heinrich Heine, the 19th century poet and democratic writer in restauration Germany. In his brilliant 1834 book, The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heine gives this sarky summary of the core idea of philosopher JG Fichte:
"The 'I' performs reflective thinking about its own intellectual activity, at the same time as it does these very acts. This reminds us of the monkey that sits by the stove and boils its own tail in the copper pot. Why does the monkey do that? Because the true art of cooking consists not just of objectively doing the cooking, but of subjectively experiencing being cooked."
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/heine/religion/chap04.html
[My own free and unscholarly translation.]