In the millennia-old quest to understand the mind, theorists have often succumbed to the temptation to imagine an inner agent, a little man—homunculus, in Latin—who sits in the control room in the brain and does all the clever work. Bottom-up, neuroscientifically inspired, homuncular functionalism is looking better and better as a model of how the brain works, since the more chaotic and competitive “computational architectures” it generates are more plausible from a biological point of view: we can begin to discern the developmental processes that could build and revise these architectures, starting in the embryo and continuing into adulthood, and also see how they could have evolved from simpler nervous systems, themselves teams of less accomplished homunculi, which sorta perceive, signal, and remember.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps