The Distributed Homunculus

The homunculus fallacy: to explain cognition, you posit a little person inside who does the thinking. But that person needs their own little person. Infinite regress. Dennett: “The best place to stop an infinite regress is usually at the beginning.”

The Mechanical Turk literally contained a homunculus — and the regress terminated, because the dwarf was a real chess player with real intelligence.

Modern AI sits between the two: it isn’t hiding a literal person, but it has absorbed the cognitive labor of millions. ImageNet required ~50,000 workers across 167 countries over 2.5 years to label 14 million images. The homunculus hasn’t been eliminated. It has been distributed, anonymized, and underpaid.