Homunculus (quote)

The computational theory of mind also rehabilitates once and for all the infamous homunculus. A standard objection to the idea that thoughts are internal representations (an objection popular among scientists trying to show how tough-minded they are) is that a representation would require a little man in the head to look at it, and the little man would require an even littler man to look at the representations inside him, and so on, ad infinitum. But once more we have the spectacle of the theoretician insisting to the electrical engineer that if the engineer is correct his workstation must contain hordes of little elves. Talk of homunculi is indispensable in computer science. Data structures are read and interpreted and examined and recognized and revised all the time, and the subroutines that do so are unashamedly called "agents," "demons," "supervisors," "monitors," "interpreters," and "executives." Why doesn't all this homunculus talk lead to an infinite regress? Because an internal representation is not a lifelike photograph of the world, and the homunculus that "looks at it" is not a miniaturized copy of the entire system, requiring its entire intelligence. That indeed would have explained nothing. Instead, a representation is a set of symbols corresponding to aspects of the world, and each homunculus is required only to react in a few circumscribed ways to some of the symbols, a feat far simpler than what the system as a whole does. The intelligence of the system emerges from the activities of the not-so-intelligent mechanical demons inside it. The point, first made by Jerry Fodor in 1968, has been succinctly put by Daniel Dennett:

Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. . . . If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behavior of the whole, this is progress. A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by prescribing a function without saying how it is accomplished (one says, in effect: put a little man in there to do the job). If we then look closer at the individual boxes we see that the function of each is accomplished by subdividing it via another flow chart into still smaller, more stupid homunculi. Eventually this nesting of boxes within boxes lands you with homunculi so stupid (all they have to do is remember whether to say yes or no when asked) that they can be, as one says, "replaced by a machine." One discharges fancy homunculi from one's scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work.

  -Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, ch 2 pg 79