This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'homunculus fallacy' (HmF). The HmF was coined by Anthony Kenny in 1971, in his essay by the same name. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kenny describes the fallacy as occurring when we ascribe to the brain attributes that can be ascribed only to the animal as a whole. Historically this fallacy is connected to the theory of vision or what is sometimes called the Cartesian theater. Someone might explain (...) human vision by saying that when we look around at objects in the world, the light forms an image on the retinas of eyes and something or some little person (where the term homunculus comes from) in the brain looks at these as if they were images on a movie screen. (shrink)

The interaction between syntax and its semantics is one which has been well studied in categorical logic. The results of this particular study are employed to understand how the brain is able to create meanings. To emphasize the toy character of the proposed model, we prefer to speak of the homunculus brain rather than the brain per se. The homunculus brain consists of neurons, each of which is modeled by a category, and axons between neurons, which are modeled (...) by functors between the corresponding neuron-categories. Each neuron has its own program enabling its working, i.e. a theory of this neuron. In analogy to what is known from categorical logic, we postulate the existence of a pair of adjoint functors, called Lang and Syn, from a category, now called BRAIN, of categories, to a category, now called MIND, of theories. Our homunculus is a kind of “mathematical robot”, the neuronal architecture of which is not important. Its only aim is to provide us with the opportunity to study how such a simple brain-like structure could “create meanings” and perform abstraction operations out of its purely syntactic program. The pair of adjoint functors Lang and Syn model the mutual dependencies between the syntactical structure of a given theory of MIND and the internal logic of its semantics given by a category of BRAIN. In this way, a formal language and its meanings are interwoven with each other in a manner corresponding to the adjointness of the functors Lang and Syn. Higher cognitive functions of abstraction and realization of concepts are also modelled by a corresponding pair of adjoint functors. The categories BRAIN and MIND interact with each other with their entire structures and, at the same time, these very structures are shaped by this interaction. (shrink)

A problem that has troubled both neo-Darwinists and neo-Lamarckians is whether instincts involve knowledge. This paper discusses the contributions to this problem of the evolutionary biologist August Weismann and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Weismann discussed an empirical homunculus fallacy: Lamarck’s theory mistakenly presupposes a homunculus in the germ cells. Wittgenstein discussed a conceptual homunculus fallacy which applies to Lamarck’s theory: it is mistaken to suppose that knowledge is stored in the brain or DNA. The upshot of these (...) two fallacies is that instincts arise through a neo-Darwinian process but are not cognitions in the sense that they involve knowledge. Although neo-Lamarckians have rightly argued that learning processes may contribute to the development of instincts, their ideas about the role of knowledge in the evolution and development of instincts are mistaken. (shrink)

In Gray's conjecture, mismatches in the subicular comparator and matches have equal prominence in consciousness. In rival cognitive views novelty and difficulty especially elicit more conscious modes of cognition and higher levels of self-regulation. The mismatch between Gray's conjecture and these views is discussed.

The so-called post-Wittgensteinian Oxford philosophers are often criticized not only for failing to provide for the causal explanation of human behavior and psychological states, but also for failing to recognize that psychological explanations require appeal to sub-personal or molecular processes. Three strategies accommodating this criticism appear in so-called homunculus theories and include: (1) that the sub-systems be assigned intentional or informational content purely heuristically; (2) that the intentional or informational content of molar states be analyzed without remainder in terms (...) of molecular processing; (3) that the entire or salient range of mental or informational molar states be accessible at the molecular level, or vice versa. Option (2) proves to be the most radical and is favored by Dennett. (1) relevantly requires a reduction of the intentional. (3) is illustrated in various ways by the views of Freud, Chomsky, Fodor. (2) is shown to depend on (1) or to be idle; and (3) embraces at least in part an appeal to molar-level explanation. The argument developed attempts to show the sense in which discourse about molar and molecular-level phenomena in the psychological context is fundamentally different from macroscopic and microtheoretical-level discourse about physical phenomena. The conclusion drawn is that neither a molar nor a sub-personal level theory is suitably explanatory in the psychological sense: a psychological theory is committed rather to a set of sub-personal components of such systems, that serve to explain molar phenomena. (shrink)

Everyone has felt those tingling, tickly sensations occurring spontaneously all over the body in the absence of stimuli. But does anyone know where they come from? Here, right-handed subjects were asked to focus on one hand while looking at it and while looking away and subsequently to map and describe the spatial and qualitative attributes of sensations arising spontaneously. The spatial distribution of spontaneous sensations followed a proximo-distal gradient, similar to the one previously described for the density of receptive units. (...) The intensity and spatial extent of the reported sensations were modulated by the focusing condition, especially in respect of the left hand. Convergent focusing acted upon the conscious perception of sensations by enhancing or suppressing them. To our knowledge, this is the first ever study of spontaneous sensations, and it offers considerable insight into their sources. The presence of the proximo-distal distributional gradient is a clear sign that receptive units are involved. The enhancement/suppression effects also confirm the involvement of attention. Finally, left-hand dominance suggests several right-hemisphere processes may be involved, such as spatial and tactile perception, and probably interoception. (shrink)

Prediction, like filling-in, is an example of pattern completion and both are likely to involve processes of statistical inference. Furthermore, there is no incompatibility between inference and neural filling-in, for the neural processes may be mediating the inferential processes. The usefulness of the “bridge locus” is defended, and it is also suggested that the interpersonal level needs to be included when considering subjective experience.

Most theories and models of memory are based on two assumptions that contain theoretical problems. These problems are reflected in the memory-trace paradox, which consists in believing that the past is contained in the memory trace, and in the fallacy of the homunculus, which consists in assuming the existence of an unconscious intentional subject. We will discuss these and present an alternative hypothesis concerning the relationship between memory, consciousness and temporality. This holds that consciousness is not a unitary dimension, (...) but is the set of distinct and original modes to address the object. Among the modes of consciousness, a distinction is made between Knowing Consciousness (KC) and Temporal Consciousness (TC). KC describes the mode of addressing the object in order to know it. TC describes the mode of consciousness that temporalizes its object according the subordinate structures of temporality, the past, the present and the future. Finally it is shown how the hypothesis accounts for a variety of memory disorders and phenomena while avoiding the memory- trace paradox and the fallacy of the homunculus. (shrink)

Jonathan Harrison teases our minds with two short stories ….

Jonathan Harrison teases our minds with two short stories ….

There is a broad consensus about the fundamental role of thehippocampal system (hippocampus and its adjacent areas) in theencoding and retrieval of episodic memories. This paper presents afunctional model of this system. Although memory is not asingle-unit cognitive function, we took the view that the wholesystem of the smooth, interrelated memory processes may have acommon basis. That is why we follow the Ockham's razor principleand minimize the size or complexity of our model assumption set.The fundamental assumption is the requirement of (...) solving the socalled ``homunculus fallacy'', which addresses the issue ofinterpreting the input. Generative autoassociators seem to offer aresolution of the paradox. Learning to represent and to recallinformation, in these generative networks, imply maximization ofinformation transfer, sparse representation and noveltyrecognition. A connectionist architecture, which integrates theseaspects as model constraints, is derived. Numerical studiesdemonstrate the novelty recognition and noise filtering propertiesof the architecture. Finally, we conclude that the derivedconnectionist architecture can be related to the neurobiologicalsubstrate. (shrink)

Ein Homunkulus im philosophischen Sprachgebrauch ist eine postulierte menschenähnliche Instanz, die ausdrücklich oder unausdrücklich zur Erklärung der Arbeitsweise des menschlichen Geistes herangezogen wird. Als Homunkulus-Fehlschluß wird die Praxis bezeichnet, Prädikate, die auf kognitive oder perzeptive Leistungen einer ganzen Person zutreffen, auch auf Teile von Personen oder auf subpersonale Vorgänge anzuwenden, was typischerweise zu einem Regreß führt. Der vorliegende Beitrag erörtert den Homunkulus-Fehlschluß zunächst in argumentationstheoretischer Hinsicht und stellt dabei ein Diagnoseschema auf. Dann werden zwei Anwendungsfelder erörtert: Instanzenmodelle der Psyche (Platon, (...) Freud) sind ihrer Natur nach homunkulusgefährdet, denn es ist aufgrund der holistischen Zuschreibungsbedingungen mentaler Fähigkeiten schwer plausibel zu machen, wie eine innerpsychische Instanz den ihr zugedachten Beitrag leisten soll, ohne über eine eigene Psyche zu verfügen. Der zweite Anwendungsfall ist das Problem des invertierten Netzhautbildes in der Philosophie der Wahrnehmung, das wissenschafts- und philosophiegeschichtlich eingebettet und unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Descartes diskutiert wird. Schließlich werden offensive Rechtfertigungen homunkularer Redeweisen erörtert und größtenteils zurückgewiesen. -- The homunculus fallacy is committed when someone tries to explain how the human mind works by postulating a little man within the mind or the brain. Homunculi are rarely posited with one’s eyes open. Rather, the fallacy occurs when predicates that properly apply to cognitive or perceptual achievements of persons get applied to subpersonal processes or to parts of persons (e.g., brains). The paper suggests a pattern for diagnosing homunculus fallacies. After taking a look at Freud’s and Platon’s homuncular metapsychologies, a case study is discussed in detail: the problem of the inverted retinal image which plagued the philosophy of perception since Kepler formulated it in 1604. It is argued that the irradiation patterns on the retina are not images, on pain of committing the homunculus fallacy. The paper closes with the repudiation of some frank apologies of homuncular explanations. (shrink)

Nietzsche offers us an account of how different drives interact with one another; it is rich but also appears to risk the homunculus fallacy. Competing attempts to deflect this charge on his behalf share an implicit consensus about the ‘epistemic ends’ of the account: they assume Nietzsche is trying to provide true explanations of psychological phenomena. I argue against this consensus. I claim that Nietzsche's characterisations of drive interaction are to be taken as fictive and are not intended to (...) have explanatory value. They nevertheless facilitate genuine epistemic achievement. Drawing on Catherine Elgin's account of the epistemic role of idealised models in science, I argue that Nietzsche's account of drive interaction is a ‘model of the mind’ that, despite relying on falsehoods, can exemplify features of our psychology that aid us in making novel predictions. We then see that Nietzsche neatly sidesteps the homunculus fallacy; we can further understand more fully what Nietzsche hopes his drive psychology will teach us. We can now resolve, for example, outstanding interpretative puzzles about the relationship between psychic integration and Nietzsche’s distinctive notion of spiritual health. (shrink)

In the target article, Iain McGilchrist draws upon his work, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (=ME), to develop the relevance of its central claims to religion. Here and elsewhere McGilchrist contends, contrary to some critics, that his construal of the divided brain hypothesis (=DBH) does not make the fundamental philosophical error which is known as the homunculus fallacy. The critics’ charge is this: McGilchrist’s DBH purports to explain certain psychological (...) features of human persons by providing an explanation that is in fact a pseudo-explanation. It is a pseudo-explanation because the DBH’s explanation of these psychological phenomena merely reintroduces the same psychological phenomena as explanatory factors that belong to the two different hemispheres of the brain. This article addresses whether McGilchrist’s position is in fact innocent of the charge of the homunculus fallacy. It is one thing to recognize the principle of contradiction and aim to avoid contradictions, it is another thing to avoid actually contradicting oneself. I show that McGilchrist consistently violates the homunculus fallacy despite his consistent claims to the contrary. I then argue that it is impossible for McGilchrist to articulate the central thesis of ME, namely, DBH, without violating the homunculus fallacy. Indeed, McGilchrist’s DBH requires that the error identified by the homunculus fallacy is not a fallacy at all, but is a deep insight crucial to understanding the making of the western world. Let us begin with the homunculus fallacy. (shrink)

Background. Although genital sensations are an essential aspect of sexual behavior, the cortical somatosensory representation of genitalia in women and men remain poorly known and contradictory results have been reported. Objective. To conduct a systematic review of studies based on electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies, with the aim to identify insights brought by modern methods since the early descriptions of the sensory homunculus in the primary somatosensory cortex . Results. The review supports the interpretation that there are two distinct (...) representations of genital sensations in SI, one on the medial surface and the other on the lateral surface. In addition, the review suggests that the secondary somatosensory cortex and the posterior insula support a representation of the affective aspects of genital sensation. Conclusion. In view of the erogenous character of sensations originating in the genitalia, future studies on this topic should systematically assess qualitatively as well as quantitatively the sexually stimulating and/or sexually pleasurable characteristics of sensations felt by subjects in response to experimental stimuli. (shrink)

It has long been appreciated that the brain is oscillatory 1. Early measurements of brain electrophysiology revealed rhythmic synchronization unifying large swaths of the brain. The study of neural oscillation has enveloped cognitive neuroscience and neural systems. The traditional belief that oscillations are epiphenomenal of neuron spiking is being challenged by intracellular oscillations and the theoretical backing that oscillatory activity is fundamental to physics. Subjective experience oscillates at three particular frequency bands in a cognitive triad: perception at 5 Hz, action (...) at 2 Hz, and attention at 0.1 Hz. This triad functions as a means of information flow across scales of magnitude in a biological fractal. The _Homunculus Solution _is proposed in which mental experience occurs at fixed scales of biology. The mind is composed of minds, perceived as "the voices in your head." Each voice has voices inside its head to increasingly microscopic scales, forming an interactive fractal of subjective experience. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

Ned Block’s Chinese Nation Argument is offered as a counterexample to Turing-machine functionalism. According to that argument, one billion Chinese could be organized to instantiate Turing-machine descriptions of mental states. Since we wouldn’t want to impute qualia to such an organized population, functionalism cannot account for the qualitative character of mental states like pain. Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland have challenged that argument by trying to show that an adequate representation of the complexity of mind requires at least 10 30,000,000 (...) homunculi. As such a large collection of Chinese is beyond comprehension, the intuitive force of Block’s example would be undercut. I argue that Churchland and Church land erroneously assume that every possible input-state combination in the human Turing-machine table must be assigned a homunculus. I attempt to restore the intuitive force of Block’s thought experiment by pointing to a way to simulate the human mind that does not require any such staggering number of homunculi. (shrink)

We have created the homunculus and have seen the monstrous being. Forty days the sperm lay buried in manure and each day at noon the Master turned his magnet across it, muttering foreign words. Then, on the fortieth day he showed me the resemblance of a man, but it was transparent, without a corpus. He told me we should feed the loathsome object for exactly forty weeks, and all this time allow it to lie in its bed of manure (...) in a continual and even temperature, so that its every member might develop. This we did, much against my will. And it grew into a human child, though much smaller than any born of Woman. Now, my friends ask me to make one for them That they may be as horrified as I. I would do so for their admiration, except that I am merely the apprentice of the Master, and I am afraid. (shrink)

1. Was ist ein Homunkulus-Fehlschluß? 2. Analyse des Mentalen und Naturalisierung der Intentionalität 3. Homunkulismus in Theorien der visuellen Wahrnehmung 4. Homunkulismus und Repräsentationalismus 5. Der homunkulare Funktionalismus 6. Philosophische Sinnkritik und empirische Wissenschaft Literatur .

A serious crisis is identified in theories of neurocomputation, marked by a persistent disparity between the phenomenological or experiential account of visual perception and the neurophysiological level of description of the visual system. In particular, conventional concepts of neural processing offer no explanation for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory. The problem is paradigmatic and can be traced to contemporary concepts of the functional role of the neural cell, known as the Neuron Doctrine. In the absence (...) of an alternative neurophysiologically plausible model, I propose a perceptual modeling approach, to model the percept as experienced subjectively, rather than modeling the objective neurophysiological state of the visual system that supposedly subserves that experience. A Gestalt Bubble model is presented to demonstrate how the elusive Gestalt principles of emergence, reification, and invariance can be expressed in a quantitative model of the subjective experience of visual consciousness. That model in turn reveals a unique computational strategy underlying visual processing, which is unlike any algorithm devised by man, and certainly unlike the atomistic feed-forward model of neurocomputation offered by the Neuron Doctrine paradigm. The perceptual modeling approach reveals the primary function of perception as that of generating a fully spatial virtual-reality replica of the external world in an internal representation. The common objections to this picture-in-the-head concept of perceptual representation are shown to be ill founded. Key Words: brain-anchored; Cartesian theatre; consciousness; emergence; extrinsic constraints; filling-in; Gestalt; homunculus; indirect realism; intrinsic constraints; invariance; isomorphism; multistability; objective phenomenology; perceptual modeling; perspective; phenomenology; psychophysical parallelism; psychophysical postulate; qualia; reification; representationalism; structural coherence. (shrink)

The primary explanatory items of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology are the drives. Such drives, he holds, are arranged hierarchically in virtue of their entering dominance-obedience relations analogous to those obtaining in human societies. This view is puzzling for two reasons. First, Nietzsche’s idea of a hierarchical order among the drives is far from clear. Second, as it postulates relations among subpersonal items that mimic those among persons, Nietzsche’s view seems to trade on the homunculus fallacy. In this paper, I argue (...) that a Hume-inspired dispositional reading of the drives’ order successfully addresses these two problematic issues. Moreover, I argue that my reading is superior to the two main competing interpretations, which I call the vitalistic reading and the normative reading, for these ascribe to Nietzsche a view committed to the homunculus fallacy. (shrink)

Unconscious emotions are of central importance to psychoanalysis. They do, however, raise conceptual problems. The most pertinent concerns the intuition, shared by Freud, that consciousness is essential to emotion, which makes the idea of unconscious emotion seem paradoxical. In this paper, I address this paradox from the perspective of the philosopher R. C. Roberts’ account of emotions as concern-based construals. I provide an interpretation of this account in the context of affective neuroscience and explore the form of Freudian repression that (...) emotions may be subject to under such an interpretation. This exploration draws on evidence from research on alexithymia and utilises ideas from free-energy neuroscience. The free-energy framework, moreover, facilitates an account of repression that avoids the homunculus objection and coheres with recent work on hysteria. (shrink)

This personal, yet scientific, letter to Alan Turing, reflects on Turing's personality in order to better understand his scientific quest. It then focuses on the impact of his work today. By joining human attitude and particular scientific method, Turing is able to “immerse himself” into the phenomena on which he works. This peculiar blend justifies the epistolary style. Turing makes himself a “human computer”, he lives the dramatic quest for an undetectable imitation of a man, a woman, a machine. He (...) makes us see the continuous deformations of a material action/reaction/diffusion dynamics of hardware with no software. Each of these investigations opens the way to new scientific paths with major consequences for contemporary live and for knowledge. The uses and the effects of these investigations will be discussed: the passage from classical AI to today's neural nets, the relevance of non-linearity in biological dynamics, but also their abuses, such as the myth of a computational world, from a Turing-machine like universe to an encoded homunculus in the DNA. It is shown that these latter ideas, which are sometimes even made in Turing's name, contradict his views. (shrink)

Self-control is considered broadly important for many domains of life. One of its unfortunate features, however, is that it tends to wane over time, with little agreement about why this is the case. Recently, there has been a push to address this problem by looking to the literature in exercise physiology, specifically the work on the central governor model of physical fatigue. Trying to explain how and why mental performance wanes over time, the central governor model suggests that exertion is (...) throttled by some central nervous system mechanism that receives information about energetic bodily needs and motivational drives to regulate exertion and, ultimately, to prevent homeostatic breakdown, chiefly energy depletion. While we admire the spirit of integration and the attempt to shed light on an important topic in psychology, our concern is that the central governor model is very controversial in exercise physiology, with increasing calls to abandon it altogether, making it a poor fit for psychology. Our concerns are threefold. First, while we agree that preservation of bodily homeostasis makes for an elegant ultimate account, the fact that such important homeostatic concerns can be regularly overturned with even slight incentives (e.g., a smile) renders the ultimate account impotent and points to other ultimate functions for fatigue. Second, despite the central governor being thought to take as input information about the metabolic needs of the body, there is no credible evidence that mental effort actually consumes inordinate amounts of energy that are not already circulating in the brain. Third, recent modifications of the model make the central governor appear like an all-knowing homunculus and unfalsifiable in principle, thus contributing very little to our understanding of why people tend to disengage from effortful tasks over time. We note that the latest models in exercise physiology have actually borrowed concepts and models from psychology to understand physical performance. (shrink)

Mental control refers to the ability we have to control our own minds. Its primary expression—attention—has become a popular topic for philosophers in the past few decades, generating the need for a primer on the concept. It is related to self-control, which typically refers to the maintenance of preferred behavior in the face of temptation. While a distinct concept, criticisms of self-control can also be applied to mental control, such as that it implies the existence of an unscientific homunculus-like (...) agent or is not a natural kind. Yet, as this Element suggests, a scientifically-grounded account of mental control remains possible. The manuscript is organized into five main sections, which cover 1) the concept of mental control, 2) the relationship between mental control and attention, 3) the phenomena of meditation and mindwandering, 4) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 5) emergence-based accounts of mental control, including an original account by the author. (shrink)

William James presaged, and Alan Allport voiced criticisms of cause theories of executive attention for involving a homunculus who directs attention. I review discussions of this problem, and argue that existing philosophical denials of the problem depend on equivocations between different senses of “Cartesian error”. Another sort of denial tries to get around the problem by offering empirical evidence that such an executive attention director exists in prefrontal cortex. I argue that the evidence does not warrant the conclusion that (...) an executive director can be localized in prefrontal cortex unless dubious assumptions are made, and that computational models purporting to support these assumptions either beg the question, or fail to model executive attention in terms of cause theories. (shrink)

In Goethe's Faust, the poet refers to alchemists' widespread ideas on artificial creation of life in the laboratory. In Faust, such an attempt was not successful: the little man,Homunculus, created by the scholar Wagner through crystallization, was a pure spirit; his form and light disappeared in an attempt to become real life. According to Goethe, life was obviously not a crystal, and he pointed to decisive differences between crystals and organic beings, the latter for example elaborating their food into (...) clear-cut organs and unable to be reconstituted from their ingredients, once destroyed. Thus Goethe's "sensitivity to the 'Gestalt' of the entire complicated organism and his general philosophical attitude .. (shrink)

Basic affects reflect the diversity of satisfactions and discomforts that are inherited tools for living from our ancestral past. Affects are neurobiologically-ingrained potentials of the nervous system, which are triggered, moulded and refined by life experiences. Cognitive, information- processing approaches and computational metaphors cannot penetrate foundational affective processes. Animal models allow us to empirically analyse the large-scale neural ensembles that generate emotional-action dynamics that are critically important for creating emotional feelings. Such approaches offer robust neuro-epistemological strategies to decode the fundamental (...) nature of affects in all mammals, including humans, but they remain to be widely implemented. Here I summarize how we can develop a cross-species affective neuroscience that probes the neural nature of emotional affective states by studying the instinctual emotional apparatus of the mammalian body and brain. Affective feelings and emotional actions may reflect the dynamics of the primal viscero-somatic homunculus of SELF-representation. (shrink)

The soul is an elusive thing, and anyone who wants to describe it must do so with metaphors, painting it in a picture of words. The metaphors one chooses for this task will reflect the aspects one is most eager to promote of what it is to be a person, a living, breathing, thinking presence in the world. Popularly, the soul is often pictured as a little fellow inside one's head, a homunculus with whom one is in constant communication. (...) Such a picture lends color to the idea that to be a sentient being is to be in a condition of inner dialogue with oneself, reasoning things out, talking things over, and perhaps also being guided by one's conscience, an inner voice heard only by oneself. Notice that the soul so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 159-160 [Access article in PDF] The Nine Lives of the Dynamic Unconscious Jerome Kroll IN THEIR PROVOCATIVE ARTICLE "Dispensing with the Dynamic Unconscious," O'Brien and Jureidini offer two basic arguments against the existence or, more accurately, because we are dealing here with constructs, the plausibility, of the dynamic unconscious. First, they assert, in contradistinction to the psychoanalytic claim that evidence of a cognitive (...) unconscious supports the claim for a dynamic unconscious, that the notion of a cognitive unconscious is incompatible with that of a dynamic unconscious. Second, they argue on the grounds of parsimony that the phenomena explained by a dynamic unconscious can be better explained (accounted for) by other mechanisms.I would argue that neither of their contentions is correct. O'Brien and Jureidini have essentially taken data and evidence from cognitive science, issued a new vocabulary, and then asserted that their vocabulary is superior and constitutes better explanations for the phenomena and observations under question. They have failed to show any incompatibility between the two explanatory constructs. O'Brien and Jureidini agree with the basic Freudian tenet that most mental activity is unconscious, that is, out of consciousness, and that much of what is out of consciousness can be brought into consciousness with proper cueing. No problem so far.The problem with the dynamic unconscious, as O'Brien and Jureidini see it, is that the cognitive unconscious is modular, best described as a series of subpersonal systems akin to a set of narrowly focused computational specialists, whereas the dynamic unconscious contains fully formed repressed memories. What O'Brien and Jureidini have now given us are multiple homunculi rather than just one CEO or executive homunculus. How literally do we want to take these subpersons? Are subpersonal mental states more satisfactory scientifically than personal-level mental states? Second, O'Brien and Jureidini unfairly attribute to the psychoanalytic position the claim that the dynamic unconscious "is presumed to contain fully formed repressed memories." With the compelling evidence from psychology and neuroscience that all memory is a reconstruction, I do not think that any contemporary psychodynamicist makes a case for fully formed repressed memories, nor is this notion essential to a theory of a dynamic unconscious. O'Brien and Jureidini invoke Occam's razor by invoking a straw horse argument. Their description of the action of subpersonal parts doing sufficient specific cuing sounds suspiciously like the work done in the dynamic unconscious. In the next section, an emotional response is described as pushing images out of mind before they can be reported on (assumedly, before they become conscious). What is doing the pushing here? Upon what principles or priorities are images pushed out of mind?The authors explain that mental "representations are inaccessible to consciousness by virtue [End Page 159] of architectural constraints rather than the operation of a repressive force." But architectural constraints sounds like another way of describing neural facilitation and inhibition. Certainly most neural activity, perhaps all, involves facilitation and inhibition of signals at multiple synapses. Repression is just a psychological construct to describe what the processes of facilitation and inhibition bring about in terms of meaningful mental activity. While we are on the topic of choice of words, the repeated description of the dynamic unconscious as subterranean is an inflammatory locution designed to rally opposition to the notion. The cognitive unconscious is equally subterranean.To look further into the supposed superiority of explanation via the cognitive unconscious, we see that O'Brien and Jureidini attribute the following processes to the cognitive unconscious: evaluation, decision making, editing out, filling in, reconstruction, and reconfiguration. But what are the bases of these processes? What guides or influences the way ideas, images, and emotions are reconstructed and reconfigured? It does not appear to be done randomly. When the reconstructive narrative becomes "significantly distorted" because the memory to be retrieved is fraught with distress, what accounts for the shape of the distortion and what (dare we say who?) recognizes that a memory is about to be distressing? We may all be unhappy with the notion of a dynamic unconscious... (shrink)