Are you proposing the idea that consciousness doesn't *do* anything, but is nevertheless the consequence of physical brains?

I think it's hard to argue consciousness doesn't do anything, personally - you'd have a hard time explaining why humans write so many words about 'consciousness'. The very existence of arguments about consciousness seem very hard to explain without consciousness. Why would a non-conscious zombie write about being conscious?

I think this is a good article:
Why Epiphenomenalism is Almost Certainly False

This is a great article! And it directly discussed my point on pleiotropic genes.

The author of this article uses James’s Evolutionary Argument as a counter to this point: If consciousness is just an evolutionary byproduct with no causal power, how have animals learned to fear pain, e.g. burning, starvation, and enjoy pleasure, e.g. eating, sex, which all seem like mental events? Basically, consciousness cannot be a non-causal byproduct of evolution, because it seems to directly affect our survival.

My reply: I’m working on Huxley’s Epiphenomenalism, ‘consciousness’ is just an observer in a physical body, with no causal power. E.g. if a body is hurt, physical signals are sent to the brain, which are handled, e.g. by flinching, physically. The conscious experience of thinking about the pain and feeling the pain are separate and non-causal. On this view, I believe that James’s argument is invalid, the process of handling pain and sex are completely physical, and we have physical drives to avoid / indulge in these actions.

On this view, I believe that James’s argument is invalid, the process of handling pain and sex are completely physical, and we have physical drives to avoid / indulge in these actions. — amber

The question is - how are these physical drives accompanied by our subjective experience of them? Even if we think the subjective experience is of no consequence, unable to do anything but observe, how does it exist at all?

I can't tell if anybody actually believes subjective experience has no effect on human behavior at all, or if that's just a big straw man that nobody believes.

I am not sure if this is an apt point of comparison. Consider that we tend to think all sorts of animals experience phenomenal conciousness. That is, there is something that "it is like" to live as a bat, a dog, a turtle, a fish, a squid, etc. Fish can feel pain, etc.

But if this is the case then conciousness is not akin to Marfan Syndrome. It's essential to seemingly all higher level animal life, something that has been around for hundreds of millions of years. So you're not talking about a gene with some unintended consequences that aren't all that relevant for selection, but rather a huge portion of the entire genome, genes stretching across species and genus, genes that affect niche construction and the context of eco systems in which animals have evolved, etc.

Second, we have good reason to think that phenomenal awareness is different in different animals. Dogs do not experience the world like we do. Some animals demonstrate some rudimentary mathematical abilities, most do not. Some animals seem to have a certain embryonic sense of logic, in that they are perturbed by what are essentially "magic tricks," chains of events that don't "add up," e.g., making food seem to vanish, etc.

However, epiphenomenalism says that none of this subjective awareness can have anything to do with natural selection. So we need to explain why awareness changes with intelligence, why more complex animals seem to have a "fuller picture," of the world.

The deeper problem is that, if causal closure is true, awareness never has anything to do with behavior. So the way "the way the world seems," is never selected for. And yet evolutionary psychology assumes, and in some ways seems to demonstrate fairly convincingly, that "the way the world seems to us," is affected by natural selection. But this seems to hurt the plausibility of phenomenal awareness having no causal role in behavior (and thus selection).

The other thing is that at any point in these hundreds of millions of years mutations could have caused phenomenal awareness to "drift apart" from the world, such that it represents the world less and less accurately. But, per epiphenomenalism, such a thing could never affect selection. So there is nothing to keep awareness from moving further and further away from reality. Yet if this is true, then we have no reason to trust our senses, and so no reason to trust the science and metaphysical doctrines that suggest to us that epiphenomenalism is true.

What would help epiphenomenalism would be if there was some demonstrable, necessary link between how phenomenal awareness "seems" and how sensory systems and intelligence have to work. That is, it would need to show some mechanism by which "the way the world seems" is kept from floating away from "the way the world is." No such link exists though because conciousness is very poorly understood.

The last problem comes from the question: "why even posit epiphenomenalism?" It seems prima facie unreasonable that our thoughts never cause our actions, so how do we end up here? The route tends to lead through smallism, the belief that all facts about larger things are entirely reducible to facts about smaller things. Empirical support for this philosophical presupposition is weak, even chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. But epiphenomenalism has us accepting a very counter intuitive and potentially self-refuting set of presuppositions largely to defend the coherence of a metaphysical doctrine that has weak empirical support and no prima facie plausibility (e.g. "bigism" seems just as good of a presupposition, parts are defined by wholes).

Please let me know what you think! — amber

My recommendation is that if you want to seriously consider the nature of consciousness, it's a good idea to avoid getting to caught up in simplistic philosophical notions like epiphenomenalism. (Not to say there isn't value in considering how epiphenomenalism can be avoided given a naturalistic view (e.g. causal closure under physics).

One thing to consider is the role consciousness plays in language based learning. Here is a sketch of an argument, though I'm not going to be at all rigorous. (So maybe more accurately stated, a set of dots that you might intuitively see connections between.)

(1) It seems obvious that language plays a big role in our learning.

(2) The amount that can be learned from someone is highly correlated with the conscious state of that person. People talking while asleep, or under the influence of powerful opiates, don't tend to produce nearly as much language that can be learned from, as those who are in a normal conscious state.

(3) It seems reasonable to think of consciousness as, at the very least, an important 'filter' on the language we social primates emit.

(4) I think we have good reason, based on our interactions with each other via language, to see our consciousness as playing a causal role in our ability to learn from, and inform/teach each other.

(5) I don't see any of the above as being contradictory to causal closure under physics.

As some added food for thought, here's a blurb on a recent article on the ability of bumblebees to engage in social learning: It seems to me, that the evidentiary case for consciousness playing an important causal role in the human capacity for social learning, is quite strong.

What do you think?

As some added food for thought, here's a blurb on a recent article on the ability of bumblebees to engage in social learning: — wonderer1

Lars Chittka is mentioned in the article. He has a great book called The Mind of a Bee.

A Claude 3 response to my argument:



Claude 3's response to "What suggestions can you make towards a criticism of the argument I presented on the philosophy forum, from within a naturalistic metaphysics."

Lars Chittka is mentioned in the article. He has a great book called The Mind of a Bee. — Patterner

Good to know. If my stack of unread books weren't so high...

Amen. And I have apnea. Even with the CPAP, it's almost impossible for me to read. Even excellent, exciting novels are almost always beyond my ability. But I commute more than a half hour each way, and often more than an hour, and audible is great for me.

Tse is not available on audible. I try to read it as I can.

Amen. And I have apnea. Even with the CPAP, it's almost impossible for me to read. Even excellent, exciting novels are almost always beyond my ability. But I commute more than a half hour each way, and often more than an hour, and audible is great for me.

Tse is not available on audible. I try to read it as I can. — Patterner

Sorry to hear about the apnea, but glad to hear Audible works for you. I've tried Audible, but didn't like it. Luckily for me, I have a short trip to work.

I do very well with this kind of book on audio. Rewind 10-30 seconds is very helpful. I always get the kindle/nook also, and read and highlight parts that particularly strike me. Someone else here recommended another neurologist, Antonio Damasio. Going through one of his at the moment.

I just went looking. Turns out it was you who recommended Damasio. Ha!

The last problem comes from the question: "why even posit epiphenomenalism?" It seems prima facie unreasonable that our thoughts never cause our actions, so how do we end up here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think epiphenomenalism is a thing many people actually believe. It's mostly posited as a thought experiment, and like Solipsism, it's something you're supposed to figure out how to overcome, not something you're supposed to fully accept and believe.

Epiphenomenalism has to be false. The most likely two reasons for it to be false are (a) we have souls, and that's where a lot of the work of a mind happens, which means if you create a "zombie" without a soul, it WILL be distinguishable from a human, because it won't act like one, or (b) the mind is entirely the result of physical processes in the brain, which means you can't have a physically working brain with all the bells and whistles of a human brain, without also having consciousness - the proverbial zombie is impossible.

Generally non physicalists go with a, physicalists go with b. Exceptionally few people go with option c, which is to accept epiphenomenalism and the genuine possibility of zombies. They have a hard time explaining some things, I think.

(b) the mind is entirely the result of physical processes in the brain, which means you can't have a physically working brain with all the bells and whistles of a human brain, without also having consciousness - the proverbial zombie is impossible. — flannel jesus

This seems compatible with epiphenomenalism though.

I can see someone arguing that we would, like robots, do the same things. We just have this internal witness. But the problem for me is, we sure talk about subjective experience, consciousness, qualia. So, in some way the fact of experiencing is in the domino chains just like everything else. It isn't epi. It seems like it has to be a substance dualism. But why does it ever come up in conversation. That other substance is necessarily causal. Perhaps it has nothing to do with causing actions, but it sure causes our noticing it which then causes us to talk about it, which then is an action. We don't have locked in syndrome.

Whatever consciousness is must be "casual" in some sense, I totally agree.

Yes, why do the epiphenomenologists talk about consciousness? Because they noticed they had subjective experience. They mulled this over and they started talking about it. If it could lead to any causes of physical things they we need a reason why their lips or fingers started moving in those ways to communicate about consciousness. It seems to me also, though I haven't fully worked this out, that we shouldn't believe in other minds if we are epiphenomenologists. We could well believe in other cognitive functions, but not that there are other experiencers. Otherwise the experiencing of our own set of qualia was used to decide other people have this stuff also.