Isn’t the concept of « Conscious agent » developed by Donald Hoffman a variation on the ancient concept of homonculus?
The idea of homunculus is the idea that consciousness is not the body or a part of the body (the brain) or a function of the body or an action performed by a part of the body, but that there is « ghost », a « little dude », hosted by the body, which is responsible for our subjective experience of consciousness (basically, a sort of personification of the mind-body apparent duality).
I suspect that the concept of conscious agents could be a sort of « atomistic » version of the idea of the homonculus, in the sense that if one assumes that consciousness cannot be an emergent property of the brain activity (hence not an emergent properly of matter), I guess one has to assume that some aspect of consciousness exists per se, in a sort of analogy with the idea of elementary particles in physics as does Donald Hoffman (A Case Against Reality).
But still, I cannot help feeling that the idea of conscious agent looks a lot like the idea of the homonculus trying to crawl back into the realm of neuroscience / philosophy through the back door.
