Comment by CodeDiver

Thanks for sourcing. I guess it's not your fault for reading the author's anthropomorphized metaphor and thinking "homunculus", particularly if you have no familiarity with Crick and Koch's project. In any case, while relating one anthropomorphic metaphor to another is not bad analogy making, the analogy doesn't correspond in fact to what Crick and Koch are looking for. They do believe consciousness has a unified quality, where the input of disparate system form a gestalt. The problem is explaining how all input from so many systems coordinate together. Functionally, there must be a juncture to make coordination--hence the "conductor" metaphor--but how, where? As it happens, there is a piece of anatomy that looks like a physical nexus--the claustrum.