Reading this post is so strange. I’ve already read the draft, so it’s not even new to me, but still very strange.
I do not recognise this homunculus concept you describe.
Other people reading this, do you experience yourself like that? Do you resonate with the intuitive homunculus concept as described in the post?
I my self have a unified self (mostly). But that’s more or less where the similarity ends.
For example when I read:
in my mind, I think of goals as somehow “inside” the homunculus. In some respects, my body feels like “a thing that the homunculus operates”, like that little alien-in-the-head picture at the top of the post,
my intuitive reaction is astonishment. Like, no-one really think of themselves like that, right? It’s obviously just a metaphor, right?
But that was just my first reaction. I know enough about human mind variety to absolutely believe that Steve has this experience, even though it’s very strange to me.
Linda is referring to the following paragraph in §3.4.2 that I just deleted :)
There’s a whole lot more detailed structure that I’m glossing over in that diagram. For example, in my own mind, I think of goals as somehow “inside” the homunculus. In some respects, my body feels like “a thing that the homunculus operates”, like that little alien-in-the-head picture at the top of the post, whereas in other respects my body feels connected to the homunculus in a more intimate way than that. The homunculus is connected to awareness both as an input channel (it “watches the stream-of-consciousness (§2.3) on the projector screen of the Cartesian theater”, in the Consciousness Explained analogy), and as an output (“choosing” thoughts and actions). Moods might be either internalized (“I’m really anxious”) or externalized (“I feel anxiety coming on”), depending on the situation. (More on externalization in §3.5.4 below.) And so on.
I thought about it more and decided that this paragraph was saying things that I hadn’t really thought too hard about, and that don’t really matter for this series, and that are also rather hard to describe (or at any rate, that I lack the language to describe well). I mean, concepts can be kinda vague clouds that have a lot of overlaps and associations, making a kinda complicated mess … and then I try to describe it, and it sounds like I’m describing a neat machine of discrete non-overlapping parts, which isn’t really what I meant.
(That said, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there were also person-to-person differences, between you and me, and also more broadly, on top of my shoddy introspection and descriptions :) )
New version is:
As above, the homunculus is definitionally the thing that carries “vitalistic force”, and that does the “wanting”, and that does any acts that we describe as “acts of free will”. Beyond that, I don’t have strong opinions. Is the homunculus the same as the whole “self”, or is the homunculus only one part of a broader “self”? No opinion. Different people probably conceptualize themselves rather differently anyway.
Reading this post is so strange. I’ve already read the draft, so it’s not even new to me, but still very strange.
I do not recognise this homunculus concept you describe.
Other people reading this, do you experience yourself like that? Do you resonate with the intuitive homunculus concept as described in the post?
I my self have a unified self (mostly). But that’s more or less where the similarity ends.
For example when I read:
my intuitive reaction is astonishment. Like, no-one really think of themselves like that, right? It’s obviously just a metaphor, right?
But that was just my first reaction. I know enough about human mind variety to absolutely believe that Steve has this experience, even though it’s very strange to me.
Linda is referring to the following paragraph in §3.4.2 that I just deleted :)
I thought about it more and decided that this paragraph was saying things that I hadn’t really thought too hard about, and that don’t really matter for this series, and that are also rather hard to describe (or at any rate, that I lack the language to describe well). I mean, concepts can be kinda vague clouds that have a lot of overlaps and associations, making a kinda complicated mess … and then I try to describe it, and it sounds like I’m describing a neat machine of discrete non-overlapping parts, which isn’t really what I meant.
(That said, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there were also person-to-person differences, between you and me, and also more broadly, on top of my shoddy introspection and descriptions :) )
New version is: