The Post-Modern Homunculus

Throughout the ages, magicians, scientists and charlatans have created life-like artifacts, some purported to be intelligent. In one famous case, the Chess Player, the intelligence was a little person hidden inside doing the thinking. Analogously, throughout the history of philosophy, and cognition, theories have arisen to explain intelligence in humans, but a philosophical problem with many such explanations is that they use what is called a homunculus argument – the explanation, upon scrutiny reveals a “little one” (homunculus) in the proposed mental apparatus that is responsible for thinking. For most of the era of computing, the Imitation Game, as so simply yet subtly put forward by Alan Turing, has been considered the gold standard for measuring this mysterious quantity, though recently Hector Levesque has pointedly argued that the time has come to abandon Turing's test for a better one of his own design, which he describes in a series of acclaimed papers. In particular, we argue that Levesque, who has cleverly found the ‘homunculus’ in the arguments of others, has essentially regressed the problem of intelligence to a homunculus in his own system.