Tournesol said:
Basically stilling the (conscious) mind is not stilling the brain. What we are conscious of is only a small percentage of what is going on, and there is still plenty of brain activity when someone is meditating.
The brain has a lot more to do than to help out with consciousness! To be alive a human needs the brain, so you aren't saying much with that observation.
Also, I don't think there is a lot known about those meditators who actually achieve 100% stillness. Most meditators are "casual" in the sense they are just trying to relax little. You don't achieve total stillness without lots of practice. I'd say the average casual meditator is still thinking like crazy, but maybe some percentage less than normal.
Tournesol said:
So there is no homunculus. . . . If he is "at the heart of the mix", he is a homunculus.
I find sneering at the homunculus concept rather opportunistic since no matter what one’s preferred theory is,
something ends up running the show, whether it is physics, or brain physiology, or something we’ve not understood yet. At
this site one can read:
“An homunculus is a 'little man'. It's evident that we don't literally have a small but fully-formed person in our heads controlling what we do, but some explanations of consciousness fail because they include a central observer which itself has all the mental properties a conscious person would have, in effect an homunculus. Explaining such a central person is obviously as difficult as explaining consciousness in the first place, and the hypothesis therefore does not get us very far.”
After labeling the concept ridiculous, someone may go ahead and use the idea anyway to help with their own theory. From the same article:
“Generally, however, homunculi are regarded as evidently absurd, and used mainly as a smear against other people's theories. Daniel Dennett is an unexpected exception here. No-one, in principle, is more hostile than Dennett to the idea of a central observer:
Consciousness Explained repeatedly denounces the idea of the 'Cartesian Theatre', whose audience must surely be an homunculus (although the same book proposes a 'Joycean Narrator', and one might question whether the substitution of an Irish novel for a French play makes all that much difference). At the same time, Dennett has claimed that cognitive scientists frequently use homunculi in their tentative theories, and that their practice demonstrates that it is alright to do so.”
I remember reading Dennett's concept of the Joycean Narrator and thinking he’d put the little man back in the brain, similar to http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/unconscious-homunculus.html effort by Crick an Koch to posit an
unconscious homunculus:
“. . . Fred Attneave . . . lists two kinds of objections to a homunculus. The first is an aversion to dualism . . . The second has to do with the supposed regressive nature of the concept . . . We all have this illusion of a homunculus inside the brain (that’s what "I" am), so this illusion needs an explanation. The problem of the infinite regress is avoided in our case, since the true homunculus is unconscious, and only a representation of it enters consciousness. This puts the problem of consciousness in a somewhat new light. We have therefore named this type of theory as one postulating an unconscious homunculus, wherever it may be located in the brain. The unconscious homunculus receives information about the world through the senses and thinks, plans and executes voluntary actions. What becomes conscious then is a representation of some of the activities of the unconscious homunculus in the form of various kinds of imagery and spoken and unspoken speech.”
A central controller concept doesn’t have to fall victim to infinite regress or duality. For example, with the concepts of
integration and
substance monism, the problem can easily be avoided. In such a model the central controller, “me,” is something that results from the constant unification of an individual’s experiences. That integrative operation creates a sort of “conscious singularity” at the core which can exert its will, accept information and know, but can’t itself do anything multipart (since it can only function as “one”). Substance monism is required to explain how non-singular conscious functions (like the intellect) are really the same “stuff” as consciousness, but rather than integrating when operating, operate instead in multipart and structured ways. The possibility of some type of homunculur theory is what the first article above suggests:
“The normal argument, in fact, is that homuncular arguments actually fall into an infinite regress, with the consciousness of each homunculus explained by ever smaller homunculini, nested like Russian dolls: but in fact this only applies to the hard-line homuncularist position that homunculi are the only possible explanation of consciousness. One can still believe that there is, as a matter of fact, an homunculus who is responsible for our consciousness, but that his consciousness is explained on some other basis. Most would agree, after all that there is a central entity inside us which does all the thinking - namely the brain.”
So I must repeat, when one manages to still his mind, one clearly see there actually is an integrating aspect, and in fact that aspect is exactly what one learns to take advantage of to still the mind. That is why someone who experiences stillness comes to believe wholly “multipart” models are missing an aspect.
). I say you do not need to think or imagine or indulge in emotions to be conscious; all those "functions" can be made to be still and something yet remains, which one readily recognizes as "me." When one achieves that stillness, it becomes crystal clear that the "me" is what is initiating all the functions, even if most people can't control how/when they set them in motion. 
