The sudden projection into my presence of a staring, homuncular creature always feels strange and violent.
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His basic conceptual framework views language as a higher-level function superimposed across multiple systems over the phylogenetic history of the human species, including motor and attention systems. This work demonstrates that the “language network” is not a static entity, but dynamically assembles necessary brain mechanisms to meet the challenges of language processing. His collaborative research provides evidence for motor system contributions to basic mechanisms of face-to-face communication for the decoding of acoustic-phonetic information and gesture, which correspond to homuncular activation patterns on premotor cortex.
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Here, too, the requisite psycho-linguistic machinery coheres with Lycan's Homuncular Functionalism and, more generally, with the above common threads. Along with Robert Adams, Lycan considers David Kellogg Lewis's notion of possible worlds to be metaphysically extravagant and suggests in its place an actualist interpretation of possible worlds as consistent, maximally complete sets of descriptions or propositions about the world, so that a "possible world" is conceived of as a complete description (i.e. a maximally consistent set of propositions) of a way the world could be – rather than a world which is that way.
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This last was rebutted by Charles Samuel Myers, writing in Nature, who saw poetry and its rhythm as too complex a subject to be reduced to the arithmetic of attention spans. In later chapters, Stratton covered the topics of the unconscious mind, the mind–body connection, and spiritual aspects of psychology. He attacked the standard dualist view of a separate homuncular entity driving the biology of mental processes. Still he concluded, from observations that people were not always aware of how their own perception differed from sensory reality, that a diluted form of the dualist theory was tenable.
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His principal interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of linguistics, epistemology, and metaphysics. The author of eight books and over 150 articles (and over 20 reviews) Lycan is an advocate of the version of functionalism, known as homuncular functionalism. Lycan is an unapologetic realist and physicalist about almost everything – mental states (intentionality and consciousness), epistemic justification, linguistic meaning, perception (especially color and smell), moral properties, aesthetic properties, and more. This philosophical tapestry is held together by several common threads, which among others include: the view that persons are complex systems composed of sub-personal systems, sub-sub-personal systems, etc.
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Thus, for example, learning a new route through a maze-like building would be mirrored in a change in the representation of that building. Action, on this view, is the outcome of a process which determines the best way to achieve the goal- state or desire, based on current representations. Such a determinative process may be the purview of a Cartesian "central executive" or a distributed process like homuncular decomposition. In contrast to traditional models of cognition, which often posit the one-way flow of sensory information from the periphery towards more remote areas of the brain, Clark has suggested a two- way "cascade of cortical processing" underlying perception, action, and learning.
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