The Homunculus Fallacy Revisited
We cannot reduce the scope of our lives without fundamentally changing what they are
Things got a bit hectic at home so there was no essay last week. It may be a couple weeks until I can return to my usual posting schedule. In the meantime though here’s a tiny thought:
I’ve written before about the homunculus fallacy. It’s the folk idea that inside the mind there is a little person that is experiencing the things happening to a person and selecting the response to them. For most people it strikes as a little silly, even if they can’t say precisely why. However, to this day this is a leading scientific description for how vision works and there is quite literally a part of the brain described as the homunculus section which supposedly maps to the various parts of the body1.
The classic argument against this idea is that it sets up an infinite regress. If the activity of the mind if really being controlled or experienced by a little person in the brain it begs the question of what is happening in that person’s brain?
However, the idea also suffers from misunderstanding that the map is not the territory. The mind and our experience are bound up in the totality of the body, it's context and how it navigates the world. It would never be possible for a smaller representation of that whole to capture everything taking place at the larger scope, if only because of the problem of interconnectedness between the parts. How could a representation of the full system accurately respond to every novel situation? Where do these unknown unknowns sit in the model? Our lives cannot be compressed.
This really matters for our self-image. We often project facets of our egos: our looks, our ideas, our social relations onto an all-encompassing sense of who we are. The truth is we are so much more than these mappings could imply. It takes a lot of attention but I continually find I am shocked when I really look and see who I am in my entirety.
Read More:
Mood:
If you’re looking for a tune to make your soul whole try this; if you need something more upbeat this should do the trick.
Thankfully it appears there is consensus building that this description of this brain area is probably wrong.