In the previous post of The metaphorical mind, not surprisingly entitled I finally got to be a homunculus part I., I argued that philosophical and psychological theories (and for that matter, commonsensical theories) that appeal to a homunculus to explain how a human being perceives or thinks simply shifts the problem confusingly inwards. The ‘little man’ inside you does not explain how something happens, it only adds an infinite regress problem to one’s account, for there must be a homunculus inside the head of each homunculus to explain its internal workings. Pretty soon, it’s turtles all the way down.

Noone much uses homuncular explanations anymore—at least not explicitly—but its worth bringing up because the thread is present in some neuropsychological accounts of psychological functioning: Brain explains mind, and so the mystery stops there at the ‘science’ of the brain. As I noted, however, one flaw of appealing to homunculi, known as the mereological fallacy (in which parts are inappropriately afforded properties of the whole) applies to some neuroscientific accounts. After all, what perceives and thinks about the world is an organism, not a homunculus or brain. Brains are a necessary part of the story, but not a complete story. There are no brains in vats in which the ‘person’ is living inside their brain unaware they are trapped. (Think how odd that is: a person is completely turned inside-out and then shrunk so that the whole person is trapped in a part of the originally whole person. Unless you believe in the Tartus in Dr. Who or take Danielewski’s House of Leaves way too seriously, insides and parts of wholes are generally smaller than the wholes they came from).

Paraphrasing from the last blog, what is remarkable in all of this is that to understand ourselves better we have resorted to inventing a copy of ourselves inside ourselves. So how did I get to be a homunculus, and what did I learn? Interestingly, I shrank myself—in a way—and starting thinking about how we have come to invent ourselves outside of ourselves as well as inside.

I fuzzily recall an English teacher once telling me that the house in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher resembled a human head and face. Whether accurate or not, the idea of two windows as eyes and a door for a mouth or picket-fence teeth has intrigued me as a way of describing and establishing fictional characters. A physical structure like a building ages and, yet, despite perhaps remarkable changes over time to its once youthful vibrancy, there is a stability and permanence to its identity. The parallel between buildings and human beings fascinates me. For example, haunted houses become resolute main characters in stories (and more than mere settings) when they can reflect a certain way in which we think about our own psyches. Even in architecture, then, our own best model is ourselves as physical and psychological creatures. We find a home and are at home in a dwelling that resembles us. Some people are log cabins; some people are lofts.

Bioethicist Paul Wolpe, in a public talk he gave at the University of Pennsylvania this summer, offered an instructive metaphor regarding brain imaging. He likened the fancily-lit brain activation pictures to aerial photographs of buildings at night. One could see with some degree of certainty lights in certain buildings—whether they were on or off—and so could localize certain activities or where the little people might be. The limitation, of course, is that no pilot overhead could tell why these little people were doing anything at all or even whether or not any little people were in the room at the time pictures were taken. It’s all just lights. (I should hasten to add that some things generally go on in rooms with the lights off.) Brain imaging reveals a where but not a what’s-it-like (lights on or off). These little people in buildings are not unlike homunculi in a way.

In a certain sense, the little people are controlling the lights in their rooms, pushing buttons and riding their elevators up and down, cruising their cars down main streets flashing their highbeams, etc. Each of these little people controls a part of their world and intertwined, it is as if the rooms, whole buildings, and even the city has sprung to life. Watch a time-lapse video of a major city block and it will seem like that at this newly calibrated time scale one starts to relate to the heartbeat of a city. Indeed, only so long as there are people willing to light up the buildings and streets, there can be a city that never sleeps.

Understanding being a part of a whole this big is a rare opportunity, in the sense that a person can feel pretty miniscule and unimportant to a whole city or even the goings-on of a single building. (Just think about the existential crisis of being one person on a little blue planet in the vastness of the universe.) But I recently had the opportunity to control a whole building with my fingertips in a way that did not feel like I was a just a cog in a massive city-shaped organism, but a homunculus (who stood in line with other would-be homunculi) to be in control of a massive physical structure.

What I had the good fortune of attending was the exhibit, “Playing the Building”, which runs until late August, at the Battery Maritime Building in New York City. (If you would like to learn more about the exhibit, attend it, or see video of it, click here.) The Manhattan exhibit is the creation of musician and artist David Byrne. The set-up is simple, but the implications are fascinating for one inclined to think a free afternoon (admission is actually free) can have philosophical import. A souvenir poster is only a dollar.

I found myself sitting at an old organ keyboard, to which was attached many cables that disappear to the far away parts of the building. It looked almost like the keyboard was a marionette and the building its puppeteer, but with me sitting there, it was quite the reverse. Pressing down on the black and white keys, there were the sounds of hammers striking radiators; air fed through water pipes sounded like ethereal flutes. The deep resonance of vibrating girders and posts sounded like Tibetan chants. Music was all around me and with each new note I played I looked for where the music was coming from this time. The music was defining the space. Amazingly, the keys in a modest sense indicated a scale of notes so that I could compose a bit. I was controlling the organs of a great body from within.

Let’s ignore the philosophical complication that I was actually playing a duet with a good friend, for the feeling was fascinatingly like what I imagine a homunculus would experience. Unfortunately, the feeling was short-lived. The more I played, the more the building did not feel alive. Instead, the more I played the more I became invested in the building. The music was my music, not the building’s. I extended my intentions through the goings-on of the building—its vibrating and hammering. The building was not a separate body of parts controlled by me. The building became an extension of me as musician just as a blind man extends his perception through a cane or a person feels the road through the tires of a car. The building would cease its life—as it were—the moment I stopped playing notes. The more I played, the more it became clear that I was not really a homunculus controlling a building (no matter how complicated a building could be imagined in the future, whatever the bells and whistles). The building was only alive when people were playing it, and it was only alive because the people were so inclined to share such life and experience.