Question The concept of a homunculus suggests that there is an inner core in each of us, a "self" that makes functional and moral decisions. The emerging sciences of complex adaptive theory and network theory suggest there is no homunculus in complex living systems (from cells to the global economy). An identifiable self has not been located by neurobiologists and may never be located. The self appears to be a composite of many internal systems that interact with many external systems. If we cannot locate the self, if there is no homunculus to point to as the agent of a "good" or "bad" decision, if people are more than the sum total of their parts and cannot be reduced to a single part (such as the self), does morality still exist? That is, does the concept of morality exists if there is no concept of the self?

Accepted:
September 2, 2007

Comments

Suppose there were a homunculus. Would it be like me? That is, would it have conflicting motives? Foggy beliefs? Occasional weakness of will? And while we're at it, would it make any difference if the homunculus were located in one compact region of the brain? Or woud it do just as well if it were distributed over different parts of the brain, and perhaps not even clearly confined to the brain alone? What would the homunculus have to be like to do the intellectual job that's at issue? And do we really need a lot of science to know that whatever we are, we aren't simple unities?

An utter disunity isn't an agent. But think about the difference between my academic department and a random collection of professors. My department is made up of diverse individuals who don't always agree. But the department has a plan of organization, it deliberates and it acts. The members of the department co-operate to get things done, and the dissenters accept decisions of the department, once they're made, even if they aren't pleased about them. We can't say anything like this about a random collection of professors. For many purposes, my department is an agent, and it can be held responsible for what it does.

Christine Korsgaard (See her "Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency" in Philosophy and Public Affairs 18:2, 1989) argues that the unity of an agent isn't metaphysical; it's practical. We count as unified agents because we actually do manage to get past the conflicts among our motives and act one way rather than another, and because we can look at our actions from a unified standpoint. That includes things like acting on the basis of reasons and principles. This seems right quite apart from whether there's a homunculus hidden somewhere within us.

I'd add that part of what you say already gestures toward this picture. You talk about "complex living systems." We are, indeed, such things. A system isn't just a haphazard collection of processes. Systems are self-sustaining complexes that, as you point out, are more than the sums of their parts. But why isn't that good enough? Why can't the right sort of system be an agent? The homunculus wouldn't really add to the story. Indeed, as my comments above suggest, even if there were a homuculus, we might well have to tell a systems story about it anyway.