Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Have you been attacked by an homunculus recently?
John Matthewson
Thursday, 23 July 2009 15:36 UTC
I have noticed that homunculi are often being used to attack postings on this forum.
Please be aware that homunculi do not exist. If someone says: “according to my cosmology/theory your observation would lead to an homunculus” it is almost certainly their theory or cosmology that is wrong. The theory gives the wrong result because homunculi don’t exist.
The Homunculus idea was invented in Ancient Greece when homunculi were called “regress arguments”. According to Alexandrian Cosmology the universe consists of a succession of three dimensional forms, each independent of the last and the next. How motion occurs or one thing causes another in this cosmology is a complete mystery but it was the prevalent cosmology until the nineteenth century. People who still hold this view are called “Materialists” (not physicalists). In the materialist paradigm nothing can be known at any instant because all things are static at an instant so it is only in the next instant that things can be known but in the next instant everything is static so it is only… You get the picture. An infinite recursion or regress occurs.
Homunculi are just a personification of this erroneous cosmology: what sees the image on the retina? An image in the brain. What sees the image in the brain? Another image in the brain etc….
So, if you are threatened by an homunculus just say “homunculi don’t exist”, if the threat persists inform your assailant that you don’t agree with Alexandrian cosmology and its regressive view of the world.
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A caricature fiction of brain: front of the brain deals with doing, back with knowing [Greekish: praxic/gnostic; Latinate: acting/knowing (or /receiving or /incurring); Old English: do/hap (or /con cf. cunning cunnan: know; cunnian: investigate)].
A self-agent (homunculus/identity) is a particular configuration of frontal functional systems which can make ‘me’ do what the particular world being proceeded in requires.
The self-agent’s “self” is projected into the back of the brain where it is entertained in the gnostic systems; and the consequences of its doings in the world are also entertained in gnostic systems. The co-occurrence of these ‘trajectories’ is the basis for learning and investigating (exploring).
Thus the self-agent changes according to what’s to be done.
In this fiction of brain, its plasticity leads to occurrences being stereotyped – in the back of the brain instances (tokens) of experience are entertained singularly in concepts/ideas (stereotypes, hard=persisting abstractions) – in the front of the brain particular doings (‘kinetic melodies’) are stereotyped into intentions (strategic programs). All occurrences in the frontal brain are non-conscious unless a version is projected into the back of the brain.
Thus instances of ‘doing configurations’ (current self-agents) with repetition are fixed into their particular ‘hard shells’ which allows the system to switch between types of active selves as appropriate. And, independently, self-projections into the back of the brain congeal into ‘family resemblances’ constituting a ‘common identity’.Such a fiction of variable self-agents may be useful in that its ‘objects’ are potentially measurable through brain imaging technologies. They could even be compared across individuals – as peculiar active configurations as functions of the particular whole brain arrangement in the fictional context of some anatomofunctional characterisation of general brains. By relating these frontal singularities to the relative functional landscapes in the back of the brain you could even make fictions of a person’s content of inner experience and compare them with the person’s general and co-occurring reports. Synaesthetics would be interesting.
Using such a fiction, Arnold’s ‘core identity’ isn’t inside the retinoid system (I had understood the term in a Latinate sense of a (multidimensional) network in the back of the brain, rather than something like the membrane at the back of the eye; but that would be ‘reticular’ – consider retinentia: a retaining in the memory, a recollection; and retineo: hold fast; keep, reserve, maintain – giving English ‘retain’) but a variable in the front. This allows self as subject/object to be entertained separately. Also, “action/perception cycles” can be entertained in this kind of brain fiction.
I have used this kind of fiction in conjunction with another one of normal and emergency functioning of complex plastic systems to figure out how to change things when someone has a dysregulation of their experience – they habitually do what they don’t want, don’t do what they want, have unbidden stuff running round their heads that interfere with life, can’t think things they need to in order to get on with living well enough, or have unwanted emotional or somatic experiences (or can’t get them) that mess them up.
Of course, these are just fables of brain, like much of the tedious abstract frogspawn (religious hermetics) spouted on these forums, until they are (1) instantiated, (2) investigated (proceeded on).
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