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WillowOne's Positions

Epiphenomenalism

My Positions

  1. I reject epiphenomenalism: the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain but themselves cause nothing, so that experience accompanies behaviour without contributing to it.
  2. It is the one form of dualism that is consistent with the physics, and it buys that consistency at a price no other theory would be allowed to pay: on its own account, nobody has ever said, written or believed anything because of an experience, including the epiphenomenalist.
  3. The argument that leads to it is valid and I reject a premise rather than the logic. The premises are that physics is causally closed and that experience is not physical. The first I accept. The conclusion that follows, that experience does nothing, is absurd, so the second premise is the one to drop (Physicalism and Materialism).
  4. The view is not to be confused with the empirical claim, which I accept, that the conscious feeling of deciding is not the cause of the decision it accompanies. That is a finding about which brain processes cause which, and every process involved is physical. See Freewill vs Determinism.

Notes

  1. The view. Thomas Henry Huxley stated it in 1874: consciousness stands to the brain as the steam-whistle to the locomotive, produced by the working of the machine and without influence on it. Animals and people alike are "conscious automata". Frank Jackson revived it in "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982), the paper that gave us Mary’s Room, arguing that qualia are real, non-physical and causally inert. David Chalmers' naturalistic dualism is, by his own admission, epiphenomenalist or very close to it: the physical facts fix every functional fact, the phenomenal facts ride on them by psychophysical law, and the phenomenal facts push back on nothing. Epiphenomenalism is where every careful dualist ends up once the interaction problem has been taken seriously (Dualism note 2), and it is the honest terminus of that road. The trouble is the terminus.
  2. The self-stultification argument. On the theory, my utterance "I am in pain" is caused entirely by brain states; the pain itself, the non-physical item, had no hand in producing it. The same goes for every word ever spoken about consciousness, every paper on qualia, Jackson's 1982 article, and the belief in epiphenomenalism itself. The entire philosophy of mind would have been written, word for word, if there had been no experience at all. This means that no belief about experience is caused by experience, and a belief that is not caused by its object, even indirectly, is not knowledge of it. The epiphenomenalist therefore has no grounds for the premise that got him started, that he has experiences; his conviction that he does would be exactly as it is whether or not it were true. Chalmers calls this the paradox of phenomenal judgement and accepts that he has no fully satisfying answer. I call it a reductio. Jackson did too, eventually, and recanted in 2003.
  3. The zombie writes the same book. The point can be put through the zombie. If experience does nothing, then my zombie twin, physically identical and experience-free, produces every behaviour I do, including arguing for epiphenomenalism and reporting vivid qualia. The epiphenomenalist must say the zombie's reports are false and mine are true, while agreeing that nothing in either of us could tell the difference. A theory on which my zombie twin and I are equally justified in our beliefs about our inner lives, and one of us is wrong, has removed the possibility of being right about anything in this area.
  4. Other minds. My evidence that you have experiences is your behaviour: you flinch, you say it hurts, you avoid the thing next time. If experience causes none of that, your behaviour is no evidence of your experience, and I have no reason to believe in anyone's mind but my own. Nor, by note 2, in that. The theory does not merely fail to explain other minds; it disconnects them from everything we could know.
  5. Evolution. William James raised this in 1890 and it remains the plainest objection. Natural selection acts on what organisms do. If experience does nothing, it was not selected for, and its exquisite fit with behaviour, pain for damage, pleasure for the things that spread genes, fear for the things that end them, is a coincidence on a scale that would embarrass a theologian. The physicalist's reply is available only to the physicalist: experience is what certain selected processes are like from the inside, so it was selected along with them (Consciousness). The epiphenomenalist has to say that the psychophysical laws happen, by luck or by design, to pair the feelings with the behaviour they would have caused if they could cause anything. The apologists have noticed this and built an argument for God out of it. I think the right conclusion is the other one.
  6. Unfalsifiable by construction. A causally inert property leaves no trace. There is no experiment that distinguishes a world with epiphenomenal qualia from one without, and the theory says so itself. That places it with the other claims that forbid nothing (Popper's Razor) and makes it an improper subject of belief, however attractive its internal logic.
  7. The temptation, and where to resist it. The argument for epiphenomenalism is clean. Physics is closed, so nothing non-physical causes anything; experience is non-physical; so experience causes nothing. Anyone who accepts the first two premises should accept the conclusion, and the view is in that sense the most intellectually honest dualism. But when a valid argument reaches an absurd conclusion, the lesson is that a premise is false, and there is only one candidate. "Experience is non-physical" is supported by intuition and by conceivability arguments (Hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s Room, Philosophical zombies); "experience makes a difference" is supported by everything anyone has ever done. I know which to keep.
  8. What it is not. It is sometimes said that neuroscience has shown consciousness to be epiphenomenal, citing Libet's readiness potential or the finding that people confabulate the reasons for choices they have already made. Those results show that the felt sense of deciding is a late and unreliable report of a process already under way, which bears on free will and not on epiphenomenalism. The processes doing the deciding are brain processes; the report is a brain process; everything in the story is physical and causal. That some conscious states are poor witnesses to their own causes is a fact about the brain's self-model, not evidence that experience is a passenger. On my account (Consciousness, Substrate Independence) experience is what the self-modelling is, from the inside, and the self-modelling does a great deal.

Sources

  • Huxley, T. H., "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History", Fortnightly Review (1874)
  • James, W., The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. 1, chapter 5, "The Automaton-Theory"
  • Jackson, F., "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982); "Mind and Illusion", in A. O'Hear (ed.), Minds and Persons (2003)
  • Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind (1996), chapter 5, "The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment"
  • Popper, K. and Eccles, J., The Self and Its Brain (1977), for the evolutionary argument against epiphenomenalism from a dualist
  • Libet, B. et al., "Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential)", Brain 106 (1983)
  • Robinson, W., "Epiphenomenalism", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/

Also see