[lit-ideas] Homunculi -- For Sale
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:47:23 EDT
(I'm not sure what R. Cummins means by 'homuncular intentions.' My guess is
that he's referring to the intentions of homunculi which depend somehow on
the intentions of other, nested, homunculi, ad inf.
Info on Cummins below. The section on homunculi is in the subsection on what
he calls "Gricean theories" for mental representation.
As the online amazon review by Mr. Williams reads:
>Chapter 2 explores the relationship between mental representation and
meaning by giving a >short account of neo-Gricean theories and their
concomitant
woes.
Too short for my taste, but I've written at great lenghts elsewhere --
nicely all deposited in the Buenos Aires University. I titled my essay,
"Communication Without Representation", and must be there somewhere -- It would
have
the relevant quotes, and my disgrace (disgrice) at reading them
books.google.com/books?isbn=1557868778...
a theory that invokes an homunculus to explain thinking has ... hecause the
homunculus itself has to think, and that thinking has not heen explained
Must say the idea of an homunculus sounds pretty mediaeval, even Ockhamian,
if you think of it. Yes, Ockham was good. He changed his name, Okham, his
birthplace in Surrey, to Occam when he became normalien at Paris. Which was a
bad thing, because had he stayed at Oxford (but then they failed him) it would
have been a good thing.
The OED must have a section on 'homunculus' for all the philosophical uses
it has been put on. Should check that at some point.
The real homunculus in reality was the spermatozoa. I read that in this book
I got from the Metaphysical Ministry as a Christmas present -- with
compliments from the Master:
D. Friedman,
A mind of its own: a cultural history of the penis.
The Free Press.
The figure 11 shows a homunculus within the head of a spermatozoon, as seen
by Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch microscopist who was the first to
report the existence of spermatozoa, in 1677 (Museum of Comparative Zoology,
the
Agassiz Museum, Harvard University).
"According to leged, Paracelsus had his penis cut into pieces and buried in
bloody manure; the plan was to have himself resuscitated months later as a
virile young man; Unfortunately, so the story goes, his bumbling servant opened
the grave too soon, finding only dust."
"For Leeuwenhoek, his microscopic observation of his own semen confirmed his
belief that mammalian ovaries were useless ornaments".
"In 1685 Leeuwenhoek asserted the existence of a man inside every sperm. He
claimed to see such 'men' ('homunculi'). At the end of the century, two
scientists released drawings of 'homunculi' they had observed in the sperm.
Nicolaas Hartsoeker drew a sperm that resembled a hot-air baloon with a tail.
Inside was a tiny naked man ('homunculus') sitting on his haunches, his head
bent
forward, and his knees pulled to his chest, held there by his hands clasped
over his shins. A few years later Francois de Plantade drew several sperm
cells, each revealing within a minuscule man ('homunculus') standing on two
legs,
his two arms crossed in front of him, and his head encased in a hood."
Geary still puzzles about the function of the 'hood'. I told him it possible
relates to the adage, "Love is blind".
"Midway through the next century, Gautier d'Agoty drew a tiny man-child
(homunculus) inside a sperm with a gigantic bald heard much like the
intergalactic aliens featured in supermarket tabloids today.
"These sightings of 'homunculi' damaged the cause of spermism. Spermism was
unable to explain why so many preformed men (homunculi) DIED in the uterus
without being 'awakened' from inside the spermatozoa that encased them."
Be careful what you wish for, Andreas would say.
"Cheers,
JL
Cheers,
JL
_http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Mental-Representation-Bradford-Book/dp/02625309
61/ref=sr_1_1/105-8373224-9873268?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192468908&sr=1-1_
(http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Mental-Representation-Bradford-Book/dp/0262530961/re
f=sr_1_1/105-8373224-9873268?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192468908&sr=1-1)
In this provocative study, Robert Cummins takes on philosophers, both old
and new, who pursue the question of mental representation as an abstraction,
apart from the constraints of any particular theory or framework. Cummins looks
at existing and traditional accounts - by Locke, Fodor, Dretske, Millikan,
and others of the nature of mental representation, and evaluates those
accounts
within the context of orthodox computational theories of cognition. He
proposes that popular accounts of mental representation are inconsistent with
the
empirical assumptions of those models. In the final chapter he considers how
mental representation might look in a connectionist context.
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