Homunculus

In line with (and motivated by) Tsvi's recommendation to do philosophy more ambitiously, I'm gonna take a stab at solving the whole homunculus problem from scratch.

From Abram's post:

The Homunculus Problem: The homunculus fallacy is a terrible picture of the brain (or machine learning models), yet, any talk of subjective experience (including phenomena such as visual illusions) falls into the fallacious pattern of "experience" vs "the experiencer". ("My brain shows me A being darker than B…")

Most ways we conceptualize our experience involve the separation between the experiencing subject and that subject's experience.

[Epistemic status: A speculation aimed at dissolving the problem.]

To conceptualize one's experience is to separate the experience, objectify it.

When a subject S is cognizing in a non-introspective way, we do not need to posit any homunculus.1 A homunculus (or an appearence thereof) arises when S starts to engage in introspection. The Matrioshka of homunculi bottoms out at some non-homunculus. This bottom non-homunculus may be capable of homunculising itself, which leads to the potential homuncular infinity but that homuncular infinity was only potential. It is never actualized; it can't be, due to the material substrate's finiteness.

To reformulate the situation without using the word "experience":

In order to make sense of one's own cognition, that cognition needs to be taken as an object of cognition, producing another "level" of homunculization.

Abram's post contains the following phrasing of the homunculus fallacy in action.

"We don't see the actual colors of objects. Instead, the brain adjusts colors for us, based on surrounding lighting cues, to approximate the surface pigmentation. In this example, it leads us astray, because what we are actually looking at is a false image made up of surface pigmentation (or illumination, if you're looking at this on a screen)."

But objects have no "'actual' colors". A color is an inner language percept constructed from patterns of electromagnetic radiation that loosely corresponds to specific (narrow intervals of) frequencies. There is no need to invoke a homunculus that sees an unfiltered image. There is no unfiltered image (more generally, there is no "true" percept/appearance) as the image in one's awareness is produced by a network of unaware processes.

We might take the conjecture even further and say that awareness arises with introspection. Before/without introspection there is cognition without content or undifferentiated content. To parse/differentiate the content of cognition, the process of cognition must be cognized, either by the same cognitive system (introspection/self-interpretation) or by some other cognitive system (extrospection/(alt-)interpretation). In particular an act of introspection can alter the content of cognition.

The language of "my brain vs me" (or similar) is invoked when one's process of cognition is taken as an object, producing a separation between two "levels" of one system's cognition.

Any perspective is a construct.

One can be wrong about one's direct experience because (1) when an image of experience—a perspective—is formed, this influences the experience; and (2) the perspective has an imperfect access to the experience it's aiming at.

One-line summary: The homunculus problem/illusion dissolves once you acknowledge that perspectives are constructed on the fly.

We don't even need to pose some space of awareness.

This leaves at least one major open question open: Why do we have an illusion of cognitive unity?

Footnotes

  1. We don't yet know what it is to "cognize" but this is a separate problem (insofar as problems pertaining to this can be "separate"). ↩