<p>Modern homunculus arguments don't assert that there is physically a little man in your head. This would be a completely vacuous argument, and nobody would make it in the present day. When people make the homunculus fallacy today, they usually do it in <a href="https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/1125/29">the same fashion as you do</a>: all the sensory information is assembled 'somewhere' and then 'some brain region' perceives it. It is an infinite regress in the sense that you didn't explain how perceiving is done, you just delegated it to a region of the brain you don't understand well. This is the same as Descartes believing that the 'seat of the soul' is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland" rel="nofollow noreferrer">pineal gland</a>. Except you replaced that gland (which we understand relatively well) by another region of the brain that we understand less well. Notice how this has no explanatory power. Not only that, it can be experimentally falsified (to a certain extent)! </p>

<p>It is hard to study consciousness scientifically because no one has given it a good operational definition. However, most discussions of consciousness talk about things like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia" rel="nofollow noreferrer">qualia</a> or basic subjective experiences. One of the most common ones discussed is the experience of colour.</p>

<p>Physics does not have colour, it just has a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Even when you look at the sensitivity of the 3 types of cones in the retina it is not discrete, but continuous. The categories of colours (i.e. "that's red", "that's blue") are produced by perception and these discrete-ish categories form the basis of colour qualia. Scientists can study these categories by asking participants if various stimuli feel like the same colour. What is known, is that the arbitrary boundaries of the categories people draw between colours is language dependent!</p>

<p>This tells you that the 'linguistic processing' and 'colour processing' regions of the mind interact to produce the qualia of colour. In other words this is a piece of evidence in support of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Whorf hypothesis</a>: language effects your subjective conscious experience. This might seem like support for integration and higher level perception by a single region, but there is a kicker. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16387848" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Gilbert et al. (2006)</a> showed that the Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. In other words, when I present colours in one part of your visual field, you experience them one way and when I present them to the other then you experience them in a fundamentally different way. The right visual field integrates with your linguistic processing and the other doesn't. Hence, you can't localize the qualia of colour to either the right or left hemisphere. They both experience them and this is usually not perceivable to us without a controlled experiment.</p>

<p>Simply put, there is no reason to believe that all sensory experience is somehow synthesized and presented to a 'seat of consciousness'. Unless you are willing to make the tautological statement that the 'seat of consciousness' is the whole brain (or almost all of it). This is consistent with most modern formal approaches to consciousness that model it as highly distributed over the whole brain, with no single 'seat'. For more info, look at the answers on the following question:</p>

<p><a href="https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/987/29">What are current neuronal explanations and models of &#39;consciousness&#39;?</a></p>

<p><sub>
Gilbert, A. L., Regier, T., Kay, P., &amp; Ivry, R. B. (2006). <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0509868103" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left.</a> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(2), 489-494.
</sub></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-20T07:48:44.550Z
Could you give more references to empirical evidence that there is no central region in the brain where it all comes together?
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-20T08:19:13.977Z
To a Martian observing a human army/corporation/bureaucracy at work, it would appear that activity is highly distributed over all the individual soldiers/employees/bureaucrats without any coordination by a single general/ceo/president. What you say applies to a nation during peace time, when the 'invisible hand' (postulated by Adam Smith) does all the coordination, but it should be obvious that our brains are organized as a hierarchy with a single self (only rarely as in multiple personality disorder do multiple selfs in a single brain arise). I just don't understand why Dennett denies this.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-20T08:41:31.443Z
In Dennett's own words: "...its as if you entered a factory and there's all this humming machinery and there's nobody home, there's no watchman, no supervisor, no boss, its all just machinery...". My guess is that he's saying such things because  **controversy generates more publicity**.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-20T10:06:17.353Z
@bfrs read my answer more carefully, and take a look at some of the models included in the final link. You are making the homunculus fallacy in your question, just not the most ridiculous one (as you've edited into your Q).
Artem Kaznatcheev
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2012-07-20T21:57:53.213Z
Artem: regarding the homunculus fallacy see my latest edit to the question.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-20T22:00:23.837Z
Artem: IMO, there is a fallacy in your answer: When you say *"the Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. In other words, when I present colours in one part of your visual field, **you experience** them one way and when I present them to the other then **you experience** them in a fundamentally different way."* Doesn't your use of the phrase **you experience** suggest that ultimately there is one region (or subset of the brain) that does all the experiencing, while the rest of the brain does the lower level interpretation and presenting?
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-21T21:40:01.363Z
@bfrs Look through reports on TBI, and show me one instance of a person losing nothing but their "self". If the self comes together at some physical point, would it not make sense to find cases where a person loses no function except their "self"? Instead what you see are specific deficits in one aspect of perception, action, integration, or memory. The "self", or consciousness, or whatever, is a dynamic illusion resulting from the fact that we view people as single entities. Cell biology says otherwise, you can lose and gain cells and still be "you". No one part of your body defines "you".
Preece
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2012-07-22T00:19:40.307Z
@Preece Off the top of my head this occured to me: what about people in a vegetative state? People who have suffered injuries to the prefrontal cortex and/or thalamus go into a coma or vegetative state, while being still alive.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-22T19:59:09.643Z
@bfrs Vegetative states usually occur with massive damage that disrupts the brain to the point where it can't function. What I mean is, damage that disrupts *only* the self aspect of brain function. For instance, damage to A1 might disrupt *only* perception of sound. Disruption of IT might *only* disrupt perception of objects. Other functions remain in-tact. A vegetative state is essentially a loss of all functions. Unless you claim that all functions rely on the self function. But a look at phylogeny shows that to be extremely unlikely.
Preece
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2012-06-28T06:21:28.943Z
2012-11-15T09:49:07.467Z
2017-04-13T12:56:16.417Z
Artem Kaznatcheev
<h1>Background</h1>

<p>Mountcastle's hypothesis, which is based on the observation of uniform cortical anatomy, suggests that the there might be a uniform cortical "algorithm". The only reason that some cortical regions seem to be specialized for particular functions, like vision, hearing, etc. is that they happen to be connected to corresponding sensory input. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/25/science/rewired-ferrets-overturn-theories-of-brain-growth.html?pagewanted=all&amp;src=pm" rel="noreferrer">ferret sensory input rewiring experiments</a> confirms this hypothesis (rewiring auditory cortex in ferrets to receive visual input, lets them see just as good). </p>

<p>Regions of the cortex which are not connected directly to any sensory input listen in on the broadcasts that are sent by neighboring regions, either directly or through the thalamus (which is currently thought to be some sort of relaying mechanism) and do further transformations and refinements at a more abstract level. For example in the case of vision, it is known that the primary visual cortex, V1, consists of a sheet of cells/columns that are sensitive to edges oriented and/or moving in particular directions. The "higher" regions of visual cortex, take the output of V1 and further process it. Neurons in V4, for example, are known to be sensitive to objects like a chair or a dog <em>or your grandmother</em>. Much of this is discussed in detail by Jeff Hawkins in <em>On Intelligence</em> where he speculates that cortical regions are connected up in a hierarchy something like:</p>

<p><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/eCMRh.jpg" alt="Cortical Hierarchy - On Intelligence"></p>

<p>Hawkins, however, does not talk much about that top level region, and only makes a passing speculation that it might be the hippocampus. <strong>But, it seems to be screaming at you, that whatever it is, it must be the seat of the self.</strong> </p>

<p>Googling on these ideas led me to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater" rel="noreferrer">Cartesian Theater</a>, a term that philosopher, Daniel Dennett derisively uses to refer to the idea that there is a central place in the brain, where everything comes together. For example, in the <a href="http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Multiple_drafts_model" rel="noreferrer">Multiple drafts model</a> Dennett says:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>"The multiple drafts model of consciousness was developed as an
  alternative to the perennially attractive, but incoherent, model of
  conscious experience called Cartesian materialism, the idea that after
  early unconscious processing occurs in various relatively peripheral
  brain structures "everything comes together" in some privileged
  central place in the brain, which one might call the <strong>Cartesian Theater</strong>
  -- for "presentation" to the inner self or homunculus. <em>There is no such place in the brain</em>, but many theories seem to presuppose that
  there must be something like it."</p>
</blockquote>

<p>However, I didn't find his arguments very compelling.</p>

<h1>Question</h1>

<p><strong>Given that there are regions of cortex that are dedicated to vision, sound, touch processing, etc., is there a region of cortex, that listens to only the final assembled portions from several "lower" regions of cortex, which then over a period of development (by age 1.5?) becomes the seat of self?</strong> </p>

<p>If this is the case, Dennett's criticism of the Cartesian Theater and a 'homunculus' observing it is outdated.</p>

<h1>Update</h1>

<p>I believe the source of all the homunculus confusion to be the little green homunculus in <em>Men In Black I</em>, and Daniel Dennett's use of this imagery to caricature any argument for a region in the brain where everything comes together and therefore being the seat of the self. </p>

<p>In essence what I'm saying is that only a small subset of the brain is the seat of consciousness, the reason being that large portions of the cortex seem to essentially be doing pre-processing steps. For example, V1 the largest area of the cortex seems to be <a href="https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/1125/where-is-the-visual-image-that-we-see-finally-assembled">assembling the visual field from the split up portions</a> coming from the eye via the LGN in the thalamus. </p>

<p>This by itself does not lead to an infinite regress, as the problem (of making sense of the world) is simplified a lot after all the pre-processing steps. </p>

<p>Another way of putting my point is via the following simple analogies:</p>

<pre><code>| body        | brain                         | Self      |
|-------------+-------------------------------+-----------|
| corporation | executive staff               | CEO       |
| army        | officer corps                 | General   |
| nation      | congress/senate/supreme court | President |
</code></pre>

<p><strong>Some more clarification on the homunculus fallacy confusion:</strong> 
Almost everyone agrees that no fallacy whatsoever is being made by saying that the brain is the seat of consciousness (SoC). Similarly, no fallacy is made merely by claiming that a subset of the brain is the SoC. A homunculus fallacy is made if it is further claimed that by identifying the SoC, an explanation of consciousness has been given. <strong><em>As Dennett rightly says, an explanation of consciousness should not contain components that are themselves fully conscious</em></strong>. Doing so only postpones the problem and leads to infinite regress. In my question's background, I'm not trying to imply that I have explained consciousness, all I'm saying is that there is evidence that only a subset of the brain is the SoC, and this SoC could be regarded as being at the center of a Cartesian theater. And of course, instead of light and sound being projected/played in this theater, there are only streams of neural spikes, representing light, sound, etc. in transduced form.  </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T01:56:11.533Z
I think when it all boils down to it, this is a duplicate of http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/987/what-are-current-neuronal-explanations-and-models-of-consciousness
Chuck Sherrington
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2012-06-13T02:36:45.317Z
Chuck, thanks for the pointer. In your answer to that question you speculate that the claustrum combines multi-modal stimuli and possibly forwards it to the prefrontal cortex. Is there more evidence that the prefrontal cortex is the seat of consciousness? Also, doesn't all this mean that Daniel Dennett's criticism of the Cartesian Theater is outdated? There might after all be a homunculus, which is a few sq. inches of cortex in the front of the head.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T02:49:33.483Z
You should take a look at [this question](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/337/29) + the answers and discussions in comments to avoid any potential confusion in the last paragraph of your post. Also, although this topic is interesting, and you obviously did your homework, try to make a more clear statement of your question (I recommend bolding it for someone who is dense like me to see). Is your question "Is there a region of the brain that becomes the seat of self?" or "Is it possible for such a region to exist?". Or is your question, "Is Dennet's critique of Cartesian Theatre unscientific?"
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T03:07:46.157Z
Not sure what you're asking here, "is there a part of the brain that only processes holistic input of all senses" or something?
Zelda
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2012-06-13T03:18:07.260Z
Chuck's answer did not provide further evidence supporting the prefrontal cortex to be the 'seat of consciousness' probably because it is still actively being investigated. Currently there is not one single widely accepted model of consciousness and it has not been proven that a single region is responsible for consciousness. Because of this, I don't think it is appropriate to say that his critique of the Cartesian Theatre is outdated. It might be one day, but not yet.
Vielle
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T03:18:20.903Z
Unfortunately your post has not become any clearer. After reading your question several more times, it seems that you are asking "is consciousness localized to one brain region, or is it distributed?" in which case I agree with @ChuckSherrington that [this Q&A](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/987/29) should answer you; in particular, if you really want a theory of consciousness with some localization, then look at [Chuck's answer](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/995/29). I recommend reading these links and maybe they will help you more clearly frame your question.
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T04:46:42.460Z
@bfrs I don't think that Crick (who really deserves credit for the idea, hehe) was saying that the PFC was "reading" everything.  It's an unknown.  Dennett is an absolutely amazing philosopher, but I don't think he would argue that he's trying for anything that's biologically plausible here , but trying to approach it as a model for inquiry.  It is a great question, by the way, I wasn't trying to discourage you, but I figured that other answer would put you a long way towards what you were asking.
Chuck Sherrington
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T05:05:33.437Z
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11316230 is a great theory paper (more from the standpoint of how it treats "binding problem" of stimui from a control engineering standpoint than the somewhat dated picture of evolution it paints)
Chuck Sherrington
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-13T13:16:48.603Z
This sounds extremely similar to the concept of a [Homunculus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus#Homunculus_argument) (even uses the same images from wikipedia) which has basically become a meme for all impossible and or self-explaining theories of mind
Zelda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-21T10:02:04.200Z
@bfs Your update seems more like an answer. You might want to remove it from your question and make it an answer. That way it can be voted on.
Jeromy Anglim
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-21T22:27:22.587Z
I've voted to close this as NARQ because the post has become more of a rant than a question. As @JeromyAnglim mentioned, your update does not seem like a question, if you believe it to be an answer, then you can answer your own question. Others will help you judge the validity of your answer by commenting and voting.
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-21T23:34:19.830Z
@JeromyAnglim My update is of course not an answer. It is a clarification to those who keep insisting that my question makes the homunculus fallacy. Unfortunately since Dennett's *Consciousness Explained* the idea of a Cartesian theater and the homunculus fallacy have become strongly associated, and it requires some care to see that the former does not imply the latter.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-21T23:39:04.383Z
@ArtemKaznatcheev You keep insisting that I'm making the homunculus fallacy. My update is a clarification about this issue. The question proper which is in bold is a very valid question, and I think somebody with deep knowledge of neurobiology could provide an answer.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-22T00:12:22.657Z
@bfrs maybe you should consider asking a new question about homunculus fallacies in general if part of my answer is confusing. Or use the answers you got here and on [your other question](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/1125/29) to ask a question that shows that you understood what Preece and I have been saying. Right now, it doesn't look like you are trying to learn or asking for an answer to a question. It looks like you are searching for somebody to confirm your preformed (and in this case, unfortunately, inaccurate) preconception.
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-22T00:31:23.180Z
@ArtemKaznatcheev First, I must thank you for taking the time to try to answer my questions. But, I must protest against your claim that I'm looking for a confirmation of preconceived notions, since that is hardly a way to do science. It is just that I'm not convinced by either Dennett's or your evidence that there is no Cartesian theater.
bfrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-22T01:32:52.257Z
A [nice video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGv1Nay2z-U) about this.
Artem Kaznatcheev
<neuroscience><consciousness><philosophy-of-mind>
Is there a region of cortex which over a period of development becomes the seat of self?
bfrs
# Is there a region of cortex which over a period of development becomes the seat of self?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2012-06-13)

Background
Mountcastle's hypothesis, which is based on the observation of uniform cortical anatomy, suggests that the there might be a uniform cortical "algorithm". The only reason that some cortical regions seem to be specialized for particular functions, like vision, hearing, etc. is that they happen to be connected to corresponding sensory input. The ferret sensory input rewiring experiments confirms this hypothesis (rewiring auditory cortex in ferrets to receive visual input, lets them see just as good). 
Regions of the cortex which are not connected directly to any sensory input listen in on the broadcasts that are sent by neighboring regions, either directly or through the thalamus (which is currently thought to be some sort of relaying mechanism) and do further transformations and refinements at a more abstract level. For example in the case of vision, it is known that the primary visual cortex, V1, consists of a sheet of cells/columns that are sensitive to edges oriented and/or moving in particular directions. The "higher" regions of visual cortex, take the output of V1 and further process it. Neurons in V4, for example, are known to be sensitive to objects like a chair or a dog or your grandmother. Much of this is discussed in detail by Jeff Hawkins in On Intelligence where he speculates that cortical regions are connected up in a hierarchy something like:

Hawkins, however, does not talk much about that top level region, and only makes a passing speculation that it might be the hippocampus. But, it seems to be screaming at you, that whatever it is, it must be the seat of the self. 
Googling on these ideas led me to Cartesian Theater, a term that philosopher, Daniel Dennett derisively uses to refer to the idea that there is a central place in the brain, where everything comes together. For example, in the Multiple drafts model Dennett says:

"The multiple drafts model of consciousness was developed as an
  alternative to the perennially attractive, but incoherent, model of
  conscious experience called Cartesian materialism, the idea that after
  early unconscious processing occurs in various relatively peripheral
  brain structures "everything comes together" in some privileged
  central place in the brain, which one might call the Cartesian Theater
  -- for "presentation" to the inner self or homunculus. There is no such place in the brain, but many theories seem to presuppose that
  there must be something like it."

However, I didn't find his arguments very compelling.
Question
Given that there are regions of cortex that are dedicated to vision, sound, touch processing, etc., is there a region of cortex, that listens to only the final assembled portions from several "lower" regions of cortex, which then over a period of development (by age 1.5?) becomes the seat of self? 
If this is the case, Dennett's criticism of the Cartesian Theater and a 'homunculus' observing it is outdated.
Update
I believe the source of all the homunculus confusion to be the little green homunculus in Men In Black I, and Daniel Dennett's use of this imagery to caricature any argument for a region in the brain where everything comes together and therefore being the seat of the self. 
In essence what I'm saying is that only a small subset of the brain is the seat of consciousness, the reason being that large portions of the cortex seem to essentially be doing pre-processing steps. For example, V1 the largest area of the cortex seems to be assembling the visual field from the split up portions coming from the eye via the LGN in the thalamus. 
This by itself does not lead to an infinite regress, as the problem (of making sense of the world) is simplified a lot after all the pre-processing steps. 
Another way of putting my point is via the following simple analogies:
| body        | brain                         | Self      |
|-------------+-------------------------------+-----------|
| corporation | executive staff               | CEO       |
| army        | officer corps                 | General   |
| nation      | congress/senate/supreme court | President |

Some more clarification on the homunculus fallacy confusion: 
Almost everyone agrees that no fallacy whatsoever is being made by saying that the brain is the seat of consciousness (SoC). Similarly, no fallacy is made merely by claiming that a subset of the brain is the SoC. A homunculus fallacy is made if it is further claimed that by identifying the SoC, an explanation of consciousness has been given. As Dennett rightly says, an explanation of consciousness should not contain components that are themselves fully conscious. Doing so only postpones the problem and leads to infinite regress. In my question's background, I'm not trying to imply that I have explained consciousness, all I'm saying is that there is evidence that only a subset of the brain is the SoC, and this SoC could be regarded as being at the center of a Cartesian theater. And of course, instead of light and sound being projected/played in this theater, there are only streams of neural spikes, representing light, sound, etc. in transduced form.

**Tags:** neuroscience, consciousness, philosophy-of-mind

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I think when it all boils down to it, this is a duplicate of http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/987/what-are-current-neuronal-explanations-and-models-of-consciousness  
> **username_0**: Chuck, thanks for the pointer. In your answer to that question you speculate that the claustrum combines multi-modal stimuli and possibly forwards it to the prefrontal cortex. Is there more evidence that the prefrontal cortex is the seat of consciousness? Also, doesn't all this mean that Daniel Dennett's criticism of the Cartesian Theater is outdated? There might after all be a homunculus, which is a few sq. inches of cortex in the front of the head.  
> **username_2**: You should take a look at [this question](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/337/29) + the answers and discussions in comments to avoid any potential confusion in the last paragraph of your post. Also, although this topic is interesting, and you obviously did your homework, try to make a more clear statement of your question (I recommend bolding it for someone who is dense like me to see). Is your question "Is there a region of the brain that becomes the seat of self?" or "Is it possible for such a region to exist?". Or is your question, "Is Dennet's critique of Cartesian Theatre unscientific?"  
> **username_3**: Not sure what you're asking here, "is there a part of the brain that only processes holistic input of all senses" or something?  
> **username_4**: Chuck's answer did not provide further evidence supporting the prefrontal cortex to be the 'seat of consciousness' probably because it is still actively being investigated. Currently there is not one single widely accepted model of consciousness and it has not been proven that a single region is responsible for consciousness. Because of this, I don't think it is appropriate to say that his critique of the Cartesian Theatre is outdated. It might be one day, but not yet.  
> **username_2**: Unfortunately your post has not become any clearer. After reading your question several more times, it seems that you are asking "is consciousness localized to one brain region, or is it distributed?" in which case I agree with @ChuckSherrington that [this Q&A](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/987/29) should answer you; in particular, if you really want a theory of consciousness with some localization, then look at [Chuck's answer](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/995/29). I recommend reading these links and maybe they will help you more clearly frame your question.  
> **username_1**: @username_0 I don't think that Crick (who really deserves credit for the idea, hehe) was saying that the PFC was "reading" everything.  It's an unknown.  Dennett is an absolutely amazing philosopher, but I don't think he would argue that he's trying for anything that's biologically plausible here , but trying to approach it as a model for inquiry.  It is a great question, by the way, I wasn't trying to discourage you, but I figured that other answer would put you a long way towards what you were asking.  
> **username_1**: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11316230 is a great theory paper (more from the standpoint of how it treats "binding problem" of stimui from a control engineering standpoint than the somewhat dated picture of evolution it paints)  
> **username_3**: This sounds extremely similar to the concept of a [Homunculus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus#Homunculus_argument) (even uses the same images from wikipedia) which has basically become a meme for all impossible and or self-explaining theories of mind  
> **username_5**: @bfs Your update seems more like an answer. You might want to remove it from your question and make it an answer. That way it can be voted on.  
> **username_2**: I've voted to close this as NARQ because the post has become more of a rant than a question. As @JeromyAnglim mentioned, your update does not seem like a question, if you believe it to be an answer, then you can answer your own question. Others will help you judge the validity of your answer by commenting and voting.  
> **username_0**: @JeromyAnglim My update is of course not an answer. It is a clarification to those who keep insisting that my question makes the homunculus fallacy. Unfortunately since Dennett's *Consciousness Explained* the idea of a Cartesian theater and the homunculus fallacy have become strongly associated, and it requires some care to see that the former does not imply the latter.  
> **username_0**: @ArtemKaznatcheev You keep insisting that I'm making the homunculus fallacy. My update is a clarification about this issue. The question proper which is in bold is a very valid question, and I think somebody with deep knowledge of neurobiology could provide an answer.  
> **username_2**: @username_0 maybe you should consider asking a new question about homunculus fallacies in general if part of my answer is confusing. Or use the answers you got here and on [your other question](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/1125/29) to ask a question that shows that you understood what username_6 and I have been saying. Right now, it doesn't look like you are trying to learn or asking for an answer to a question. It looks like you are searching for somebody to confirm your preformed (and in this case, unfortunately, inaccurate) preconception.  
> **username_0**: @ArtemKaznatcheev First, I must thank you for taking the time to try to answer my questions. But, I must protest against your claim that I'm looking for a confirmation of preconceived notions, since that is hardly a way to do science. It is just that I'm not convinced by either Dennett's or your evidence that there is no Cartesian theater.  
> **username_2**: A [nice video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGv1Nay2z-U) about this.  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2012-06-28. Score: 16

Modern homunculus arguments don't assert that there is physically a little man in your head. This would be a completely vacuous argument, and nobody would make it in the present day. When people make the homunculus fallacy today, they usually do it in [the same fashion as you do](https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/1125/29): all the sensory information is assembled 'somewhere' and then 'some brain region' perceives it. It is an infinite regress in the sense that you didn't explain how perceiving is done, you just delegated it to a region of the brain you don't understand well. This is the same as Descartes believing that the 'seat of the soul' is the [pineal gland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland). Except you replaced that gland (which we understand relatively well) by another region of the brain that we understand less well. Notice how this has no explanatory power. Not only that, it can be experimentally falsified (to a certain extent)!

It is hard to study consciousness scientifically because no one has given it a good operational definition. However, most discussions of consciousness talk about things like [qualia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) or basic subjective experiences. One of the most common ones discussed is the experience of colour.

Physics does not have colour, it just has a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Even when you look at the sensitivity of the 3 types of cones in the retina it is not discrete, but continuous. The categories of colours (i.e. "that's red", "that's blue") are produced by perception and these discrete-ish categories form the basis of colour qualia. Scientists can study these categories by asking participants if various stimuli feel like the same colour. What is known, is that the arbitrary boundaries of the categories people draw between colours is language dependent!

This tells you that the 'linguistic processing' and 'colour processing' regions of the mind interact to produce the qualia of colour. In other words this is a piece of evidence in support of the [Whorf hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity): language effects your subjective conscious experience. This might seem like support for integration and higher level perception by a single region, but there is a kicker.

[Gilbert et al. (2006)](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16387848) showed that the Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. In other words, when I present colours in one part of your visual field, you experience them one way and when I present them to the other then you experience them in a fundamentally different way. The right visual field integrates with your linguistic processing and the other doesn't. Hence, you can't localize the qualia of colour to either the right or left hemisphere. They both experience them and this is usually not perceivable to us without a controlled experiment.

Simply put, there is no reason to believe that all sensory experience is somehow synthesized and presented to a 'seat of consciousness'. Unless you are willing to make the tautological statement that the 'seat of consciousness' is the whole brain (or almost all of it). This is consistent with most modern formal approaches to consciousness that model it as highly distributed over the whole brain, with no single 'seat'. For more info, look at the answers on the following question:

[What are current neuronal explanations and models of 'consciousness'?](https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/987/29)

Gilbert, A. L., Regier, T., Kay, P., & Ivry, R. B. (2006). [Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left.](http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0509868103) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(2), 489-494.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Could you give more references to empirical evidence that there is no central region in the brain where it all comes together?  
> **username_0**: To a Martian observing a human army/corporation/bureaucracy at work, it would appear that activity is highly distributed over all the individual soldiers/employees/bureaucrats without any coordination by a single general/ceo/president. What you say applies to a nation during peace time, when the 'invisible hand' (postulated by Adam Smith) does all the coordination, but it should be obvious that our brains are organized as a hierarchy with a single self (only rarely as in multiple personality disorder do multiple selfs in a single brain arise). I just don't understand why Dennett denies this.  
> **username_0**: In Dennett's own words: "...its as if you entered a factory and there's all this humming machinery and there's nobody home, there's no watchman, no supervisor, no boss, its all just machinery...". My guess is that he's saying such things because  **controversy generates more publicity**.  
> **username_2**: @username_0 read my answer more carefully, and take a look at some of the models included in the final link. You are making the homunculus fallacy in your question, just not the most ridiculous one (as you've edited into your Q).  
> **username_0**: Artem: regarding the homunculus fallacy see my latest edit to the question.  
> **username_0**: Artem: IMO, there is a fallacy in your answer: When you say *"the Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. In other words, when I present colours in one part of your visual field, **you experience** them one way and when I present them to the other then **you experience** them in a fundamentally different way."* Doesn't your use of the phrase **you experience** suggest that ultimately there is one region (or subset of the brain) that does all the experiencing, while the rest of the brain does the lower level interpretation and presenting?  
> **username_6**: @username_0 Look through reports on TBI, and show me one instance of a person losing nothing but their "self". If the self comes together at some physical point, would it not make sense to find cases where a person loses no function except their "self"? Instead what you see are specific deficits in one aspect of perception, action, integration, or memory. The "self", or consciousness, or whatever, is a dynamic illusion resulting from the fact that we view people as single entities. Cell biology says otherwise, you can lose and gain cells and still be "you". No one part of your body defines "you".  
> **username_0**: @username_6 Off the top of my head this occured to me: what about people in a vegetative state? People who have suffered injuries to the prefrontal cortex and/or thalamus go into a coma or vegetative state, while being still alive.  
> **username_6**: @username_0 Vegetative states usually occur with massive damage that disrupts the brain to the point where it can't function. What I mean is, damage that disrupts *only* the self aspect of brain function. For instance, damage to A1 might disrupt *only* perception of sound. Disruption of IT might *only* disrupt perception of objects. Other functions remain in-tact. A vegetative state is essentially a loss of all functions. Unless you claim that all functions rely on the self function. But a look at phylogeny shows that to be extremely unlikely.  

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