Writing and representation - Narrative Intelligence - page 286

way, given that such a problem could hide behind any of the vast number of
unarticulated assumptions that form the background of any such activity.
A story about some instructions at a performance in an art gallery is another
story about instructions, this time a single sentence that one person hollered to
a group of others. These instructions did not function well because the recipi-
ents could not see, or even imagine, what in the setting the instructions could
be talking about.
A story about my routines for reading the Sunday Globe is a story about an
instruction I issued to myself in the course of reading the newspaper one Sun-
day morning. The pattern of activity in which the instruction participated had
long since become routine. Nonetheless, the way in which the instruction went
wrong reveals that it was something like an natural language imperative and
not, for example, a computer program. In this case, a change in the environ-
ment led me to make a different sense of an ambiguous phrase than I used to.
The stories are not supposed to prove any general propositions. Instead,
they invite you to be aware of similar phenomena in your own experience of
everyday representation-use. Computational investigations and awareness of
everyday life can influence one another. Parallel pursuit of these two kinds of
inquiry will, I believe, lead to deeper understandings of why our life is the way
it is and why machines can take certain forms and not others.
The homunculus and the orbiculus
In the old days, philosophers accused one another of believing in someone
called a homunculus - from Latin, roughly “little person”. For example, one
philosopher's account of perception might involve the mental construction of
an entity that “resembled” the thing-perceived. Another philosopher would
object that this entity did nothing to explain perception since it required a men-
tal person, the homunculus, to look at it. Computational ideas appeal to these
philosophers because they can imagine “discharging” the homunculus by, for
example, decomposing it into a hierarchy of ever-dumber subsystems (Dennett
1978: 124).
But the argument about homunculi distracts from a deeper issue. If the
homunculus repeats in miniature certain acts of its host, where does it conduct