I am told that the Buddha cautioned against trying to grasp this concept intellectually and did not believe it could really be done. If true, then I suppose any attempt to do so will necessarily fall short to some degree. But perhaps one can show the fingers pointing to the moon even if one cannot show the moon. Especially if contrary to Einstein's objections, the moon really isn’t there unless one is looking at it.

I seem to see a good corollary to this debate in the nature of matter and mass. Matter being the experience of energy, and mass one of its properties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo232kyTsO0

When one looks closely (very closely) at a table, there does not appear to be any “thing” there at all, yet bang one's head on in and we experience it nonetheless. Similarly, when one looks closely at the self, one cannot find any permanent thing there at all, yet we have an experience of self nonetheless. If I define self as that experience, I can say there is self. If I define self as that which is experiencing, I cannot find any thing to own the experience, and yet “I” am still doing the defining.

We can call into question whether or not there is really a difference between the experiencer and what is experienced. If we look closely at matter, we find only energy. Yet what is energy but a conceptual substance that we transform and move about through our mathematical equations? We have lots of information about energy, but we don’t really know what energy itself is. Does it have a fundamental nature, an existence, outside of the mathematics that we use to describe and manipulate it? Perhaps not, perhaps the information we have about energy is really all there is.

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/th...ut-information

If information is fundamental to our universe, then the forms we experience are just that information given form by and presented within and to our own consciousness. Everything we experience is in fact ourselves, and there is no true dividing line between self and not self, it is all self, making the term itself redundant or meaningless. Of course we don’t have to ask Wheeler or Shannon, ask any neuropsychologist and they will tell us as much. Neurons from the senses fire or don’t fire (1 or 0), and based on that data the brain creates a universe within where we experience that which the brain formed from that information. The difference between the neuropsychologist and the physicists may be that the former still clings to an independent objective physical reality which the senses sense, while the latter may say there is no such thing, only information informing consciousness to create the forms within. If the physicists are right, then is not our own little universe within just a personalized set of the larger set of information from which we all form our realities within? Is then our own little personalized set of information just an arbitrarily drawn distinction between information we identify as self and the larger set of information? What happens if we decide such a distinction is not real and drop it? Can there be an experience without an experiencer? Is it possible, that much of what I claim as “my” experience is just experience that “I” was not really there for at the time, yet I am aware of it after and claim it as “my” experience after the fact as "I" cannot conceive otherwise? Can the experiencer ask if self exists or not without the experience of self? Does not the question presuppose the answer?

If the moon is only there when we are looking at it, perhaps the self is only there when we are looking for it, as long as we don’t look too closely and see that there is no thing there at all.