Talk:Homunculus argument

message: Okay, so if a person reflects in a cognitive way upon his situation -- i.e., what his senses and reasoning powers tell him -- then it's turtles all the way down, is it? 
Maybe so. The homunculus fallacy, it seems to me, suffers under the weight of what we have learned in the past century or so regarding the workings of the universe. 
Sure, the mundane world presents itself to our sense in ways that LOOK like everything is causal. Time, after all, flows in a single direction, and events cascade, one after the after. Right? Or not. 
In the classical descriptions of existence, a homunculus fallacy makes sense. But what we now suspect and in some cases know is this: 
The universe appears to be underlaid with a foamy quanta, where probability reigns. Furthermore, energy and matter and gravity are manifestations that in space-time connect among one another in wholly relativistic ways -- i.e., they're fungible. And now come cosmologists to suggest that the entire universe may be the equivalent of a fantastic, projected hologram -- a virtual reality, if you will.
Thus (and these words come as fast as he can write them from a lay person who has but taken a few college physics courses), the mind that leaps from the vastly complex construct of the brain could be holistic, relativistic and quantum-rigged in its own fashion. Do we create existence by our own bootstraps? The evidence points toward that. Is the (or perhaps, "an") observer necessary for existence to manifest? Quite possibly. If there are multiple homunculae,there also may be multiple universes, allowing us to almost literally have our cake and eat it, too. 
If string theory is right, the entire cosmos is effectively composed of a series of tiny, vibrating, looped strings -- rings, I suppose. You might picture that as a universal reptile which is eating its own tail and yet in the act finds sustenance. Reality is synergistic. The act of observing is only suggestive of a homunculus if you think in classical terms, e.g., one on one, and only in an orderly, seemingly causal progression of discrete events. 
But if there are more than four dimensions, if there are very occasionally quantum effects that (I stress the word) appear to represent paradoxes or, worse, to violate physical laws through sheer statistical chance, if a wave collapses into a particle by the mere act of observation, if space and time are malleable and the latter is traversible in more ways than we can at the moment engineer (as for instance in the Aspect experiment, where entangled particles moving apart at light speed nevertheless share information), then mind may indeed be able to reflect upon itself, may be both external and internal as circumstance warrants, without the necessity for troublesome regression.
Having read this article a few times, I, a (I hope) reasonably bright woman with a high-school education (abnout to enter college) cannot make heads or tales of it. Granted, I've not studied logic overmuch, but I've been readging the logical fallicies section and seem to be bale to understand most of them decently... perhaps some easier to understand examples can be added? Kuroune 03:17, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untitled commentary 

message: Should this article be moved to "Homunculus argument" and "Homunculus fallacy" made a redirect? The article uses "argument" almost exclusively. Ibn Abihi 00:49, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Never mind I did it myself. If you disagree with this, feel free to change it back. Ibn Abihi 01:09, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Argument or Fallacy 

message: For some reason, everyone assumes that just because something goes back infinitely, that means it can't exist.
But if each following step takes half as much time and brain space (and whever other resources are necessary) as the previous, it's totally possible to finish an infinite regress with finite resources! See also the calc solution to Zeno's paradox.
:The problem's that unlike Zeno's paradox, which resolves itself all the way down to a "smallest conceivable distance" such as a Planck length, and also unlike that paradox which has a definite end in terms of physical possibility, infinite regress in the context of ever smaller Homunculi has no forseeable end, since "smaller" Homunculi are only conceptual. This is a true infinite regress because you can make a theoretical mind as "small" as you want to.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.95.157.254 (talk) 09:35, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem is Supertasks. But in reaction to the other users, never mind if the fallacy thesis is true or not, it is subjective and still way too controversial to take it as given. Today's philosophy can not provide any hint to the concept of consiousness. --Chlebashořčicí (talk) 08:12, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

text: I'm sure it's because it offended the Jews who run this site's staff ring somehow and not for any logical and reasonable justification.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 47.42.170.138 (talk) 07:01, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  What's wrong with an infinite regress? 

message: I have cleared up this page, because, although I understand it, as the first commentator above pointed out, I think it's hard for an outsider to understand. Feel free to play around with what I have written as you see fit. 130.209.6.40 17:33, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Have cleared this up

message: I feel this article may present an overly strong (apparent) assertion that all homunculus arguments are false, which is true on their own due to the infinite regress thing, but in the brain many such arguments are physically true up to a few levels of recursion. 
For example, the retina really does project onto the V1 visual cortex as a coherent image, which is then filtered by the rest of the brain as it is passed up through the cortex. At each stage local parts of the image remain coherent (although the image does break up on the large scale). this leads to the often pointed out fact (sadly this has been done) that if two toothpicks are inserted next to each other in the visual cortex, the resulting areas of lost visual perception are spatially next to each other.
Of course the image is eventually interpreted into more abstract things like "tree", "house", "turtle", but, for the first few levels, each section of the cortex acts as a homunculus interpreting the lower levels.
Many other parts of the brain, particularly input and output segments are organized in this manner, although admittedly the vision system is one of the best examples.
Anyway, the point is that I feel this article could be very misleading to anyone not already well versed in cognitive neuroscience.
Unfortunately, as I haven't been well trained in philosophy, I don't feel qualified to rewrite this myself. I might accidentally make it look like Cartesian ideas have value, which would be a real step backward.
--Anuran (talk) 14:31, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, and think that the article is just confusing, in general.  For example: "In-completeness in this model therefrom that modern science already emphasized:" — that's not valid English grammar, and "incompleteness" is not a hyphenated word. -LesPaul75talk 20:16, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Perhaps a little overboard? 

message: I know teachers over the years have assigned students to add to Wikipedia, and I feel this article may have been created this way but which also have slipped through the revision cracks over the years. If you check the oldest version, I think this is borne out. For instance, in the current revision one paragraph uses "cognate" as a verb, which is simply unnecessary. The first revision was also created in mid-October, which is the perfect time of the Sociology semester for more bad writing to suddenly appear on WP.
The article reads like it has never shaken this off, or perhaps has suffered multiple assignment-driven revisions, or perhaps only exists at all as a receptacle for student attempts at coherent writing, but in general I think the whole thing could use a rewrite. Manys (talk) 16:42, 27 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Written like a school project

message: I think the "in terms of rules" section is potentially  original research and at least a little out of date. Maybe I'm just trying to cover up my thought that "It doesn't say what I want it to say".
Empirically, the only thing we see the brain composed of is Neurons, carrying out rules. (I can probably dig up a lot of primary and secondary sources saying brains are made of neurons (briefly disregarding "support infrastructure" like glia cells, blood vessels, etc ). We've also seen artificial neural nets make large strides in "computer vision" lately. 
My own conclusion of the homonunculus argument (and I think the way I learned in neurophysiology) was the opposite of the conclusion presented in this section: to wit: obviously there's no infinite regress of little men. There's no separate vis vitalis (a now discredited concept) and biology (and thus neurophysiology) must be explainable by mechanistic means alone. That is to say: Vision arises as an emergent property of correctly formulated rules. (which -again- seems to be borne out in modern computer vision applications (however imperfect you still might consider those to be)). 
Then again, biologists and psychologists don't talk with each other very often, so from an encyclopedia perspective: possibly there's papers that go either way in the two different fields. But I would like to see some sources here!
--Kim Bruning (talk) 09:55, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "In terms of rules"