However the story seems much more problematic when we talk about retrieving memories, accessing word meanings, dreaming and having ideas. Who is accessing this mental content and from where? — Andrew4Handel

Is it that you don't mean this is any more problematic at all as regards the "homunculi problem", just that it comes with a "where is it all coming from" problem, to boot?

Who is accessing this mental content and from where? — Andrew4Handel

You are - from here.

Who are you and where is here? A gamble.

Is it that you don't mean this is any more problematic at all as regards the "homunculi problem", just that it comes with a "where is it all coming from" problem to boot? — bongo fury

I suppose so.

The perception of internal representations leaves us trapped in our mind.

But I think the homunculus problem is more vivid when you cannot allude to receiving external information.

I personally view this perceiver as my "self". The self is subject to experience. I think focusing on the perception of mental content might be more valuable than mapping the process of signals from the nervous system.
Because it is easy to get the brain to simply respond to external stimuli by creating similar patterns to external stimuli without explaining how this gets perceived (see retinotopic mapping)

The binding problem has been explaining why information occurring in different perception becomes a unified perception. This might be solved by tracing neuronal activity on a path to a part of the brain linked to every other part and receiving a final impulse. (you might call this the easy problem of perception)

I am beginning to sympathise with the idea that perceiver might be the soul and some form of dualism.

I am beginning to sympathise with the idea that perceiver might be the soul and some form of dualism. — Andrew4Handel

There is a lot of that about. Even skepticism about a soul or homunculus munching popcorn in the Cartesian theatre doesn't seem to imply skepticism about the images on the screen in the theatre (or wherever, but it looks like the same theatre to me). Here's me continuing in that vein... I'll try and find some better literature for to save your non-soul...

This and this.

However the story seems much more problematic when we talk about retrieving memories, accessing word meanings, dreaming and having ideas. Who is accessing this mental content and from where? — Andrew4Handel

The brain retrieves relational memories as needed, via some very fast lookup process, which is amazing in itself, and perhaps our conscious glimpses into these imaginings are dimmed qualia, as a good shortcut, these memory images having 90% transparency so as not to interfere with the direct qualia reality currently present.

The subject would ever be the brain itself, perceiving itself, as kind of a higher sense than our regular senses. Yes, we are ever trapped in the 'mind' (it is the brain, too). The brain's own evolved scheme of more and more symbolic language becoming through higher and higher modules is so unique and extra amazing that we can hardly believe that it is the brain's doing, and, yet, where else would it be happening.

Chalmers posits that information can be represented in two ways, physical and mental, where the mental is just as fundamental as something like mass.

I accept Descartes's cogito ergo sum. By having an experience I know for certain that I exist in some form but I can doubt my the content of my experiences.

I don't think homunculi or mental images are a problem I think a lack of focus on them is. Theories often say nothing about homunculi but you know they are required for the theory to be coherent. That is what happens when you people mental representations. But people do not seem to see the requirement for a perceiver or homunculi in their theory.

Reading your link to your previous post that appears to be a form of behaviorism. I think strictly mental content like dreams and concepts are inexplicable that way.

I think the bigger problem is explaining how a brain can process sense-data and produce a sense of awareness of our surroundings, whereas that same brain, when put through a blender, can't produce a thing. This same problem pops up in simulation theory- a simulation is essentially a series of switching operations, and how is it that one sequence of switching operations can (supposedly) simulate consciousness, while a different sequence of switching operations doesn't produce anything? Is there something "special" about the combination of switches that produced the simulated consciousness? If so, what is it, and why is it special?

Replace "combination of switches" with "specific neural activity" and you have the same problem:

I accept Descartes's cogito ergo sum. — Andrew4Handel

I accept cogito ergo something, just not ergo the whole Cartesian theatricals.

I know for certain that I exist — Andrew4Handel

Agreed, if "I" refers to your bodily person. Seems to me that a zombie robot could well make the same inference from detection of its own unconscious processing. (Insisting that cogito or pense implies specifically conscious processing would only beg the question.) But probably "I" gives a free pass to all manner of "subject" woo?

but I can doubt the content of my experiences. — Andrew4Handel

That's beside the point if we are trying to understand consciousness. Obviously the content can be real or imaginary. The problem is what sense can be made of calling it "content".

I don't think homunculi or mental images are a problem — Andrew4Handel

Neither do most people/homunculi. :wink:

Theories often say nothing about homunculi but you know they are required for the theory to be coherent. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, sounds plausible... examples?

when you people mental representations. — Andrew4Handel

Clarification? People as a verb, is that?

the requirement for a perceiver or homunculi — Andrew4Handel

Not forgetting entirely the option of glossing 'perceiver' as 'perceiving bodily person'?

Reading your link to your previous post that appears to be a form of behaviorism. I think strictly mental content like dreams and concepts are inexplicable that way. — Andrew4Handel

I'm a (amateur) behaviouristic consciousness-explainer, not a behaviouristic consciousness-denier. I want to understand what makes some of my cogitations - dreams included - conscious. Why behaviourist? Only in reaction to the age-old assumptions about inner words and pictures. When what really accounts for consciousness may be better understood as social skills with actual words and pictures.

Agreed, if "I" refers to your bodily person. — bongo fury

I cannot be sure my body exists. To be sure anything exists I have to be sure that my consciousness exists and does not deceive me.

I cannot be sure my body exists. — Andrew4Handel

Fine... if, this means you want to ergo less, after all.

But of course you want to ergo more. Unquestionably a mind and questionably a body.

I don't see the ergo.

In this picture the brain is the perceiver that somehow processes the information received from the nerves into a perception. This does face a homunculi problem of who the observer is.

However the story seems much more problematic when we talk about retrieving memories, accessing word meanings, dreaming and having ideas. — Andrew4Handel

I agree with the gist of your perspective, but don't believe the "mind's eye"—as its sometimes called (i.e., the presence of a first-person point-of-view)—serves as a homunculi problem.

All percepts obtained via physiological senses will be consciously known precisely because they are known (in an acquaintance sense of the term) to the first person point of view. Furthermore, the first person point of view does not stand apart from the physical body but is instead in many ways unified with the body. Tactile perception is often overlooked, but makes for a good example: When feeling oneself touching the ground via one's feet, for instance, this will be the first person point of view which so senses the ground via the skin of one's feet.

Secondly, we hold ample empirical evidence to know that the first person point of view—including its abilities to perceive, sense, understand, and act—is bound by the physiological makeup of its body; in vertebrates, this being primarily constituted of the Central Nervous System.

To my best understanding, a homunculus is a little human within the human body. While this can be a consequence of Cartesian thought (re: the thinker within the body), imo it does not apply to awareness, i.e. the perceiver, i.e. the first person point of view. Reworded, the homunculus is a thing (the thinker) within a thing (the body). By comparison, the perceiver, aka the first person awareness addressed, is—if anything that can be currently inferred—more akin to a process, as per process theory. But it is not a thing and, hence, not a homunculus. Or so I so far believe.

(edited "homunculi" to "homunculus" where appropriate)

I am making the distinction between perceptions that makes us believe there is an external world and perceptions of mental content such as concepts including mathematics and the meaning of words that do not a have a clear link to an external world.

What we perceive as the external world is nothing like the numerous entities science has discovered such as cellular mechanisms, DNA,the quantum world and biochemical reactions.

Knowledge of the nervous system is conceptual and symbolic and not based on immediate experience.I learnt about neurons and neurotransmitters by reading text books.

I am referring to terms used in cognitive science such as "retrieving word meaning." It is not clear that any of the activity observed in brains scans etc has the quality or capacity of retrieving word meaning.
It is easy to simply plaster mental concepts onto unexplained correlations of brain activity.

Thank you for your further clarification. I do, however, feel that I am in agreement with your point of view in all general regards save that of there being such a thing as a homunculus. Please correct me where you disagree.

A favorite example of mine is one’s awareness of “a word that is at the tip of one’s tongue”. Here, the individual has no momentary awareness of what the phenomenal word is (neither via auditory nor visual awareness, etc.), but does, nevertheless, apprehend via awareness its non-phenomenal meaning (which the individual is seeking to express via phenomena). Had a professor I greatly liked who talked to me about “knowing that one knows”; to me also interesting on the same level, but more complex to get into. Awareness of one’s own happiness or suffering, certainty or uncertainty, etc., as a first person point of view also easily qualifies—for none of these are phenomenal; they’re not visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc.; and yet one knows of them via direct awareness.

BTW, from my own baggage of trial and error, I’ve found that “perception” isn’t the most beneficial word to use when it comes to meaning apprehension. It works in the Latin language(s) I know of, where it quickly connotes “understanding”--very akin to the English “see” (as in “do you see what I mean”)--but, in English, perception is greatly associated with, and only with, phenomenal percepts (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, proprioception, etc.). Though I know that a proper technical term for awareness of such things as thoughts and emotions is lacking.

At any rate, to better express my previous post, I wasn’t intending to reach toward scientism. Rather, we empirically know from others and historically that were we to lose a limb, we’d likewise lose a great deal of awareness that manifests via that limb. We know that were brain damage to occur, we as first person points of view would in due measure to the damage have impaired awareness (in the broadest sense of awareness possible). In other words, whatever the metaphysical relation between mind and body may be, we also know from experience that we as first person points of view are most often unified with our bodies (exceptions such as numbness in a limb being relatively rare).

Nevertheless, our bodies are things, whereas out awareness is not a thing. Our awareness is tethered to our bodies in often indistinguishable ways, but this does not of itself come close to denoting what awareness is. To be curt, what awareness is metaphysically is still a mystery.

Again, my main contention in this thread is that awareness—the first person point of view which perceives phenomena, senses emotions and the like, and understands meanings and abstractions—is not itself a thing within a thing. Hence, that we are not homunculi.

This, I hope, is a better summation of my view.

Since this is of interest to me, and so as to further debate:

I personally view this perceiver as my "self". The self is subject to experience. — Andrew4Handel

I am beginning to sympathise with the idea that perceiver might be the soul [...] — Andrew4Handel

Self, as might be no surprise, if a very convoluted concept. As one example of this, when I strongly empathize and/or sympathize with another such that their state of being becomes my own, they in many a sense become a part of my own self. If a romantic partner, they are not my property but, instead, are and ever become a part of me (belonging can connote both values). More individualistically, self consists of ones unconscious mind and, if for example one accepts Jungian philosophy, also some portion of the universal unconscious (the latter can tentatively be espoused as vehicle for some other person being part of one's self). All this mostly to say that the first person point of view is not an island divided from its total mind--nor, again, is it a static thing; its not a homunculus, as far I understand it.

Roughly speaking, Ancient Latin had it that the soul is the anima and that the mind (mens) consists of animus. While both terms are related to "breath/life", as well as animation, to my best understanding/interpretation the anima was conceived to be more along the lines of that which endows one's body with breath/animation/vitality (even when in dreamless sleep). By comparison, the animus was a realm of challenge, a realm wherein will exerted itself.

Thus conceived, both anima and animus are aspects of one's self. Aspects of self to which the first person point of view is central, but, again, not in a static manner.

Curious to find out the extent to which you'd disagree with these perspectives.

One of the 'facts' of mental activity that makes us who we are is that so much of it is invisible to that part of the brain that operates as the conscious self. Most of those sensory signals that pour into the brain don't pass over the desk of the conscious self. They pour in, are processed and stored. Sometimes we take note of them as they happen: A bee stings your foot; you smell roasting meat; you see an inordinately sexy body; you hear an unusual bird call and you stop to listen.

Worse, we don't know what the brain is busy doing. The endless chatter in our heads or the scratching of EEGs, or fMRI scans tell us that a lot is going on in there, but we don't have control over most of it. When I write, "I" -- my conscious self -- is mostly not composing the sentences. What I write is news to my conscious self, quite often -- like when I start a reply to someone, and realize that what I am writing is decidedly not what I want to say.

Even so, we needn't think that anyone else other than "us" is doing the composing. What I see coming out on the screen is almost always completely agreeable, and I recognize the source, the phrasing, the examples, etc. "Great -- that's my stuff, alright."

Sometimes, when we are dealing with a very unfamiliar problem, and we set out to think about it very deliberately, we can (that is the conscious self) do the thinking first hand. But most of the time, all that is carried on out of image, sound, odor, tactile, flavor, etc. We just don't have cameras inside our heads monitoring what is going on in "the big factory" surrounding our little command post of conscious self.

All to the good. We really don't want an update on every operation going on in the brain, let alone going on in the rest of the body.

As our brain forms prenatally, postnatally, in infancy, and on though to adulthood, these capacities are built. A baby doesn't have a big factory surrounding the not-yet-finished command post. As William James put it, to a new baby the world is one big buzzing confusion. It takes time to learn how to process all the input. And it takes time to put together a working self.

The only way we can know something, is through consciousness. If something is truly unconscious we can't know it. For example do you know my middle name?

The only way you could know my middle name is if I told it you and it entered your consciousness.

To believe that anything exists you have to believe you exist in some form otherwise the position does not make sense. When I am dreaming I believe that what happened in the dream is a fiction. I don't simply believe every thing I experience is true.

I can separate myself from my experiences otherwise I would just be fooled by whatever I perceived.

I don't think anything could be known without a self. I don't believe the moon knows it exists. As Thomas Nagel has said Objectivity is a view from nowhere. I think knowledge requires a unified perceiver which i consider is the self. The mystery is how the subjective perspective arises in the face of a universe that is possible infinite and made of vast amounts of atomic interactions.