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Here’s what Daniel Dennett has to say (passage said to be cited in Pinker 1997, How the Mind Works, p. 79) about homunculi:
Homunculi are bogeyman only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain…. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow minded, blind, homunculi to produce the intelligent behavior of the whole, this is progress. A flowchart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executive); each box specifies the homunculus by prescribing a function without saying how it is accomplished (one says, in effect: put a little man in there to do the job). If we look closer at the individual boxes we see that the function in each is accomplished by subdividing it via another flowchart into still smaller, more stupid homunculi. Eventually this nesting of boxes within boxes lands you with homunculi so stupid (all they have to do is remember whether to say yes or no when asked) that they can be, as one says, “replaced by a machine.” One discharges fancy homunculi from one’s scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work.