our head (brain)? Who reads, understands and uses them? Again, the implicit answer is, and some would argue must be, a "homunculus": a little man who reads the rules of the world and then gives orders to the body to act on them. But again we are in a situation of infinite regress, because this implies that the homunculus utilizes cognitive processes that are also rule bound, which presupposes another homunculus inside its head, and so on and so forth. Therefore, so the argument goes, theories of mind that imply or state explicitly that cognition is rule bound cannot be correct unless some way is found to "ground" the regress. This is important because it is often assumed in cognitive science that rules and algorithms are essentially the same: in other words, the theory that cognition is rule bound is often believed to imply that thought (cognition) is essentially the manipulation of algorithms, and this is one of the key assumptions of some varieties of artificial intelligence. Homunculus arguments are always fallacious unless some way can be found to "ground" the regress. In psychology and philosophy of mind, "homunculus arguments" (or the "homunculus fallacies") are extremely useful for detecting where theories of mind fail or are incomplete. The homunculus fallacy is closely related to Ryle's regress. Counterarguments The above cited regress argument does not necessarily invalidate all forms of the homunculus argument. The regress relies on the idea that the homunculus "inside" the brain must itself have a homunculus inside it but it is not clear that this is a necessary condition. A dualist might argue that the homunculus inside the brain is an immaterial one (such as the Cartesian soul), or a mystic might assert that the homunculus is a recharacterization of the infinite consciousness of God (or true self), and thereby does not require a homunculus (or any form, spiritual or material) to have sensory experience, since such experience is a self-aware expression of the universe requiring no end to the regress other than the present moment itself. A non-dualist may assert, similarly to the mystic, that a human life form (or any organism) is coterminous with and indivisible from its environment, with this unified field of awareness (i.e., universal consciousness) mistaking itself for a homunculus (or an ego). A neurosurgery professional may point to the cortical homunculus, a distorted representation of the human body, based on a