muso wrote on Nov 22
nd, 2012 at 7:40pm:
You're straying from the analogy that I set up - that of the canvas and the artist / the brain and intelligence.
I used the word artist in an analogous fashion.
- but let's get into the second part of your argument. I'm not sure in what context you use the term homunculus, as I've mainly heard the term being accompanied by sniggers, but I take it that you're really talking about a kind of duality or perhaps poly-ality (?) . I know what you mean by the terms "mind" and "soul", and I even used the term "muse". I regard these as intrinsic effects that result from basic brain physiology, and it can be shown that the brain works in a kind of cyclic feedback process. Regardless of the fact that they are consequences of mental activity, they are very real in our perception.
Perhaps everything you say about mind or soul or muses (or gods) may be perfectly valid. The mental landscape is potentially an incredibly complex place, in the context of those 100 billion neurons.
It's easy to see that developing as we do with two brains in one, we can easily acquire a sense of duality. The brain stem and hypothalamus are the seat of instinct, feelings, love, appetite, sex, sensory inputs and basic life support, whereas the cerebral cortex is involved in thinking and rational thought.
The sensory link between the hypothalamus and the reticular activating system of the cerebral cortex is severely baud limited, and this is responsible for our delayed reaction time compared to that of many animals, and for most routine tasks we have a tendency to use our subconscious (at least 90% of the time)
Well...
I don't see how it is possible for you to think that "feelings, love, appetite, sex, sensory inputs" are in any way autonomous from language, abstraction, memory, 'collective soul'.
My sense - correct me if I am wrong - is that 'data' gets in your way of thinking straight.
I remind you that human experience is not about the reported data about human experience but about the human experience.
What science is able to capture is not what life actually lives. There is a residue that is inaccesible to science (quantifying, datafying), now and always.
What one lives and what one reports as data are not the same. The cat of science will never catch the mouse of lived experience because by definition the cat is schematic while the mouse is unique, even if there is such a thing as 'mice'.