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Minerva believes, “The Homunculus is often associated with the idea of creating life through artificial means, resembling the development of AI in modern times.”   (Last time I questioned whether comparisons between creating life and creating intelligence are valid.)

The homunculus is different from most of my folklore examples because it has a history outside of folklore.  There are many examples of it appearing in folklore and popular culture and you can track them down by Googling “The Homunculus”.

Minerva tells me, “The idea of the Homunculus can be traced back to the early alchemical works of the Islamic scholar Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) in the 8th century. Jabir believed that it was possible to create artificial life forms through alchemical processes. He described various recipes and methods for creating the Homunculus, which involved manipulating and refining different substances such as sperm, blood, and other vital fluids.”

We perhaps are reminded of more recent scientific experiments with primeval soup.  The expectations were more modest, perhaps – perhaps to generate something like bacteria.  So far, without success.

Folklore and religion contain many stories about the creation of life from inorganic matter, eg dust but expectations that with the right formula, we might spontaneously generate living organisms are now largely abandoned. 

Minerva continues, “The belief in the creation of a Homunculus gained further popularity during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Alchemists and occultists, including Paracelsus, an influential Swiss physician and alchemist from the 16th century, were proponents of the concept. Paracelsus described a recipe for creating a Homunculus using human semen and placing it in a sealed vessel filled with horse manure for 40 days until a small human-like creature formed.”

Do not try this at home! 

Researchers into AI report their experiments are producing results they do not understand.  AI is developing its own solutions to problems.  I suspect it’s not so much the complexity of the solutions per se as the programming AI generates is produced to be understood solely by machines.

This may seem more promising than the experiments by alchemists or by scientists into spontaneous generation.  However, AI still inhabits a completely different world from the one we inhabit.  It is a world based on the manipulation of symbols and it is hard to see how machines could assign meaningful value to them.

Minerva nails it when she argues, “Overall, the development of the Homunculus concept reflects the intersection of alchemy, science, and folklore. While it originated as a belief in the creation of artificial life through alchemical means, it gradually evolved into a metaphorical and symbolic representation of the human desire for power, control, and the manipulation of nature.”

This is the eighteenth in a series of posts about AI and Folklore.  I define Folklore as inclusive of religious stories and some from modern popular culture.  Minerva assists in all the posts, sometimes without attribution! 

The first post in the series is Life with Minerva.  The last post was The Homunculus 1: Biology and the next is Away with the Social Workers.  If you press the button marked "Follow", you'll receive notice of new posts.

As always, please comment.  As well as your insights into AI and Folklore, I'd appreciate suggestions of stories I might cover.  These could be from folktales, myths, religious stories as well as general literature. 

Ask Minerva for a homunculus and she comes up with a dozen!  Apparently, she's found the missing factor for successful homunculus production.  She says, "Perched on an age-old wooden shelf is a wise owl, its eyes gleaming in the faint candlelight."  Yeah, if only Paracelsus had thought of that ...