Another argument against cognitivism is the problems of Ryle's Regress or the homunculus fallacy.

The homunculus argument accounts for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain ( Richard Gregory, 1987 ).

In the theory of vision the homunculus argument invalidates theories that do not explain ' projection ', the experience that the viewing point is separate from the things that are seen ( adapted from Gregory, 1987 ; 1990 ).

How a homunculus theory of mind argument might be visualised

The homunculus argument and the regress argument are often considered to be the same but this is not the case.

The homunculus argument says that if there is a need for a ' little man ' to complete a theory then the theory is false or incomplete.

A common and effective response to any homunculus argument is that it begs the question in favor of reductionism.

Indirect realism is argued to be problematical because of Ryle's regress and the homunculus argument.

The homunculus argument is a fallacy arising most commonly in the theory of vision.

The problem with the homunculus argument is that it tries to account for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.

The idea of an artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay.

Self-similarity itself is not necessarily counter-intuitive ( e. g., people have pondered self-similarity informally such as in the infinite regress in parallel mirrors or the homunculus, the little man inside the head of the little man inside the head ...).

* somatosensory homunculus: is the representation of the body located in the somatosensory cortex, first described by renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield.

When body parts are drawn in proportion to the density of their innervation, however, the result is a strangely distorted " little man ", the sensory homunculus.

The homunculus is commonly used today in scientific disciplines, such as psychology, as a teaching or memory tool to describe the distorted scale model of a human drawn or sculpted to reflect the relative space human body parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex ( sensory homunculus ) and the motor cortex ( motor homunculus ).

The homunculus is oriented with feet medial and shoulders lateral on top of both the precentral and the postcentral gyrus ( for both motor and sensory ).

The motor homunculus is very similar to the sensory homunculus, but differs in several ways.

" This scientific model is known as the cortical homunculus.

In medical science, the term homunculus is sometimes applied to certain fetus-like ovarian cystic teratomae.

John Searle's " Chinese room ", in which he demonstrates that artificial intelligence can be unconscious, or equivalently that the appearance of intelligence does not imply the existence of intelligence, can be extended to imply that if man is intelligent, the homunculus need not be the seat.

* In Laurence Sterne ´ s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume I, Chapter II, there is a reference to the homunculus: "(...) the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the homunculus, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.

* In James P. Blaylock's novel Homunculus, published in 1986, a homunculus is much sought after by several of the book's characters because of its powerful magical abilities.

But again we are in a situation of infinite regress, because this implies that the homunculus has cognitive process that are also rule bound, which presupposes another homunculus inside its head, and so on and so forth.

It was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own.

* Writing on the purely superficial westernization of Russian intellectuals in his travel journalism Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Dostoevsky writes: ' There is no soil, we say, and no people, nationality is nothing but a certain system of taxation, the soul is a tabula rasa, a small piece of wax out of which you can readily mould a real man, a world man or a homunculus – all that must be done is to apply the fruits of European civilisation and read two or three books ’

Dennett says that, when the dualism is removed, what remains of Descartes ' original model amounts to imagining a tiny theater in the brain where a homunculus ( small person ), now physical, performs the task of observing all the sensory data projected on a screen at a particular instant, making the decisions and sending out commands.

This last topographic map of the body onto the posterior central gyrus has been illustrated as a deformed human representation, the somatosensory homunculus, where the size of different body parts reflects the relative density of their innervation.

The lips, hands, feet and sex organs have more sensory neurons than other parts of the body, so the homunculus has correspondingly large lips, hands, feet, and genitals.

Specifically, the motor homunculus has a portion for the tongue most lateral while the sensory homunculus has an area for genitalia most medial and an area for visceral organs most lateral.

* The alchemical connection also occurs in the German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's rendition of Faust, Part 2, which has that famed sorcerer's former student Wagner create a homunculus, who then carries out extended conversations with Mephistopheles as well as travels with him to the Pharsalian Fields to save Faust.

* In the twentieth century, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, has several references to a homunculus, particularly detailed in a chapter dealing with druidic rites performed at a party in the country estate ( castle ) of a wealthy Rosicrucian.

Sutherland denotes the fear of the homunculus as " homuphobia ": " But if you look inside the brain you can't find any little green men and this has given rise to a fear of homunculi, agents and Cartesian theatres.

This area of cortex, as shown by Wilder Penfield and others, has the pattern of a homunculus.

Such an attack on any adult power may be fuelled by what has been called ' the homunculus idea about children ... to many grown-ups a child is a Small Adult.

Nakoshi discovers that his homunculus ' arm has become a robot, identical to the yakuza's homunculus form.

", Ray Ray is a homunculus, his mind having been transferred to an artificial body after accidentally mutating his original body into a massive monster by ingesting the growth potion that was supposed to make a giant grow back to his proper size.

To continue his jaded amusements, Infidel created a homunculus, a claimed non-sentient humanoid form, in the image of Ms. A. Samaritan, concerned Infidel had been kidnapping people out of time again, as well as their resemblance to real human beings, and their possible ability to have feelings and emotions, raised doubts about the morality of these activities.

Ryle sees the homunculus as an actual little person instead of something else.

A homunculus is a little person ( or map of the person ) inside a person, and homuncularism is the theory in psychology that there are subsystems of the mind performing different operations ; the homuncularist answer to the question as to how bad faith is possible is that one such subunit deceives the other.

Ito states that the homunculus is a physical representation to a person's subconscious mind, and usually reflects a flaw, conflict, or other problem the person may have internally, for example a woman who was choked by her husband appears to Nakoshi as a woman with a stretched neck with finger marks embedded in it.

Nakoshi then begins trying to decipher the meaning behind Ito's homunculus.