Talk:Epiphenomenalism

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[edit] Clean up

Hi all. I recently made some changes in an attempt to improve the article. I don't mean to step on anyone's toes, but the article needed some improvement. Here's a brief description of what I did:

  • added references and notes,
  • removed paragraphs about beer & free will (they were quite tangential and unhelpful),
  • merged "background" and "explanation" sections,
  • tried to add sources that were cited with no reference provided,
  • other general copyediting done.

- Jaymay 10:00, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Intro paragraph

The intro/lead paragraph to this article has several issues. First, it is misleading to say that epiphenomenalism is the view that "physical events have mental effects, but mental events have no effects of any kind". It does claim that some physical events or states have mental effects, but not that all physical events or states have mental effects. The wording is ambiguous and even leans more toward the "all" reading. It would just be better to say that epiphenomenalism is the view that physical states can cause mental states, but that mental states do not cause any physical states. Second, while I do think epiphenominalism is crazy, it is not neutral to call it a "radical idea"—and these articles are supposed to have a neutral point of view. Third, the last sentence is odd. Is is part of what epiphenomenalism claims? If so, then it should be more obvious. Perhaps a semicolon would indicate that. I'm going to make these changes. They are fairly minor. Hopefully no one will mind. - Jaymay 07:57, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

what about a short lingustic explication of the word 'epiphenomenalism'? -- rory —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.240.31.165 (talk) 05:38, 6 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Miscellaneous

One of the main arguments against epiphenomenalism, which states that only the brain has influence over the mind, is that free will is eliminated. Since free will is an obvious element of consciousness, epiphenomenalism has no bearing.

This philosophy is contrasted by interactionalism, which states that the mind and body have a mutual influence over one another.

Both epiphenomenalism and interactionalism fall under the heading of property dualism.

It was my understanding that the argument Epiphenomenalism entails that free will is not an obvious or necessary element of conciousness, that conciousness is just a byproduct of the corresponding brain states that cause it. I'm certainly not an expert or anything, though. Dan 08:58, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Relevance of Epiphenomenalism as Current Theory (vis-a-vis Argument by self-knowledge etc.)

Dan, you are correct. Indeed, there is a bit of a definitional problem, because the intuitive understanding of what the terms "mind" and "consciousness" refer to are different for an Epiphenomenalist, especially if you are a property dualist. Mention should be made of this.
For example, it is possible for a property dualist to assert that qualia are the only relevant attributes of consciousness (meaning self-consciousness and value-laden terms, such as comfort and discomfort, associated with qualia, are products of higher brain function that are passively experienced by the conscious "self" in association with the aforementioned qualia).
A property dualist may also claim that it is equally as difficult to make statements about intrinsically ineffable qualia as it is to make similar statements about intrinsically ineffable quantum attributes in physics (cf. Stanford entry on Epiphenomenalism under "quarks") and would also be able to assert that we intuit the existence of phenomenological consciousness due to a combination of subjective experience and abstract reasoning by the brain (of the same sort we would use to posit the existence or non-existence of an actual infinity, or a parallel universe).
Our brains would therefore, under this argument, have a sort of 'shadow' semantic understanding of consciousness and other ineffable phenomena, that parallels our subjective experience of those phenomena, in the same way postmodernists posit an unbridgeable disconnect between objective definition and subjective meaning.
This is significant because the way the article is written now seems to lightly dismiss Epiphenomenalism as a theory that makes a whole lot of sense until you try to explain how we "know" we are conscious. The foregoing explanation contains the elements of several possible rebuttals to the argument (by self-knowledge) against epiphenomenalism.
It is also worth pointing out that some of the arguments against epiphenomenalism by contemporary physicalists (functionalists, i.e. strong AI theorists, or strong materialists, i.e. brain = mind) are axiomatic in nature, presupposing that consciousness is a functional attribute of the brain associated with a thing called the 'mind' that can be identified with a physical process.
This common supposition affects any attempt to determine the relevance of the theory of epiphenomenalism in any review of the literature on the subject of contemporary philosphy of the mind, including this wikipedia entry.
For example, neurobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have increasingly come to use the 'argument by natural selection', often cited against epiphenomenalism, which uses the factual evidence of evolution in an attempt to establish a metaphysical conclusion of materialism (physicalism). Epiphenomenalism provides one of several possible alternatives to any such one-to-one correspondence between natural selection and philosophical materialism; in addition, epiphenomenalism is considered unsettling by prominent physicalists, so it is often argued against from a "dogmatic" standpoint (cf. Stanford entry; BBC Transcript, The Mind Body Problem, inter alia.)
Many contemporary theories which cite epiphenomenalism as discredited tend to presuppose physicalism; and have either a functionalist or a strictly physicalist understanding of consciousness (taken to mean either self-consciousness in and of itself, or else seen as an emergent physical force that is simultaneously less than spiritual, yet capable of causation).
In more general terms, Mention in the article should also be made of the distinction between Cartesian dualism, property dualism (as it relates to epiphenomenalism), and physicalism (i.e. materialism or materialist monism).
I am not the person to do it, since I'm nothing remotely like an expert in the field. --Brian

[edit] Removed transcript

I removed the following section from the article, as it's just a transcript of a radio interview. Anyone want to extract relevant ideas and put them back in the article? Gwimpey 03:38, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Transcript:

BBC Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg’s In our Time; The Mind Body Problem About 33 mins in… Melvyn Bragg, chair, and Julian Baggini, editor of Philosophers’ Magazine are talking...

Melvyn Bragg: Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s Bulldog, took Dawin’s notion’s on, and seemed to make an emphatic entry into this (Cartesian) Mind/Body dispute. Can you tell us about that and Epiphenomenalism, if you can unwrap that?

Julian Baggini: Epiphenomenalism is very interesting, and Huxley -- there aren’t many people who claim to be followers of Huxley. He’s not one of the people undergraduates first go to, but in a sense, his ghost seems to straddle the whole contemporary debate about this.

What Huxley was doing was taking on board three facts that seem to now be undeniable, and go to what was at the time the most logical, but in another way counter-intuitive conclusion. The facts being we are entirely biological organisms; the physical world has what we call causal closure, which means that any effect in the physical world is caused by something else in the physical world, and nothing else; and the organ of thought is the brain, a physical object. Now if you put all those things together, what that seems to imply is that whatever goes on in our minds is just somehow the product of a purely physical process going on in the brain. So if you like he’s seeing humans as a kind of biological machine and the inner life that we have is just the hum of that machine. The hum of a machine doesn’t move the machine, it’s just a byproduct of it, an Epiphenomenon.

Huxley’s view was that that’s what thoughts are; we have a pain and we go ‘Ow’ and we think intuitively that the feeling of pain is what’s making us pull away, or making us go and do something about it, but the Epiphenomenal view is that that’s not true-all the causes are at the physical level, the way it feels just sits on top. That’s such a dispiriting and distressing conclusion that a lot of people would say it the duty of any decent theory of mind to show that Epiphenomenalism is false -- Jerry Fodor, a well known contemporary philosopher, once said if Epiphenomenalism is true then that’s the end of the world, meaning the world isn’t how we think of it at all. Epiphenomenalism is seen as the terrible thing we have to avoid, and if you can show that your opponent's view leads to epiphenomenalism then some people would take that to mean that it is inadequate, but what I think is interesting is if Epiphenomenalism should be taken more seriously.


[edit] mess

this article is going crazy, lets get some discussion on this page, so we are on the "same page". Spencer k 03:56, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

68.149.104.200, you are right, i had the wrong impression of the cognitive revolution stuff. also for criticism #2, i butchered what you had about introspection etc, not because it was bad but because i didnt really understand it. trying to avoid article bloat. you've done alot of work thanks. for minor edits, please check the box Spencerk 17:18, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. I'm going to do a run through and try and clean it up a bit. More help would be good. - Jaymay 07:58, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Epiphenomalism vs. Anti-epiphenomalism

“ Many argue that data such as the Bereitschaftspotential undermine, rather than support, epiphenomenalism. Such experiments purport to measure the point in time when conscious experience occurs, which presumes that conscious experience has a measurable effect. ”

If instead the premise (presumption) was that the conscious experience has a measurable cause rather than a measurable effect, then we cannot say that:

“ Such a premise contradicts epiphenomenalism, which claims that conscious experience has no effects and therefore cannot be measured. Hence, so the argument goes, any experiment that detects whether or when conscious experience occurs argues strongly against, not for, epiphenomenalism. ”

Epiphenomalism 1 - Anti-epiphenomalism 0

“ A second common criticism of epiphenomenalism is that it feels like the mind has influence. For example, it is possible to imagine the most bizarre body gesture with your mind and then to do it. William James urged something similar to this criticism against epiphenomenalism, which he called "Automatism":

"However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. One must be impartially naif or impartially critical. If the latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or 'metaphysical,' and will probably preserve the common-sense view that ideas are forces, in some translated form. But Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her data, and stopping short of metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must be naïve; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field of study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to talk of them as such. She gains absolutely nothing by a breach with common-sense in this matter, and she loses, to say the least, all naturalness of speech."[2]

 ”

This quote criticizes the notion that causation is "unintelligible". However, Epiphenomalism says that are no effects of consciousness but that consciousness branches from observable causes (physical events), even though these same physical events lead to a different branch of other effects such as behavior. Epiphenomalism therefore accepts intelligible causation of our actions.

Epiphenomalism 2 - Anti-epiphenomalism 0

“ Another criticism of epiphenomenalism is that the presence of the theory of epiphenomenalism seems to contradict the very idea. Most would agree that thinking is a mental process, but, if epiphenomenalism is true, how could someone ever express the idea of epiphenomenalism? ”

Simple. Assume the following:

1) "Physical events are the causes of mental states."

2) "Physical events also cause the so-called effects of mental states, behavior."

Explaining the behavior which allows me to reach these premises are as follows.

"I can see, I can hear, I can taste, I can smell, I can touch, therefore I recieve stimuli. The nervous system does its thing while the qualia and conciousness I experience is a budding of this functioning, but it does not decide the functioning in anyway. My behavior and conciousness are co-derived from the stimuli I recieve."

“ It would be impossible, because this "expressing" would require the banned connection between mind and behavior. If epiphenomenalism is true and thinking is a mental process, then its truth is ineffable. So in the example above, Pierre cannot convey his pleasure. ”

By assuming that physical events lead to mental states, but not vice versa, one has not banned the connection between mind (mental functioning) and behavior (effects that neural firing has on the muscles of the body). It is to say that the process of mental functioning both generates the mental states and the neural firings to the muscles. So behavior and mental states have a common cause (stimuli -> mental functioning).

One could say mental states are equal to the sum of the mental functions, like combining numerous waveforms into one single complex waveform. However, each mental function affects muscles in various ways, and therefore a different part of behavior, therefore there is branching of effects, where the branching "state of mind" is a generalization of the causes of behavior (another branch).

Epiphenomalism 3 - Anti-epiphenomalism 0

“ Finally, many argue that the history of epiphenomenalism is revealing. It was concocted as a potential solution to a problem facing dualism: By what mechanism does the mental realm affect the physical? Epiphenomenalism provides an out: The mental realm simply doesn't affect the physical, so the issue is moot. Because it arose out of an attempt to save another conjecture rather than by its own merits, epiphenomenalism can be seen as suspiciously motivated. ”

The mental realm is of two kinds, states and processing. What epiphenomalism's primary claim concerns are the states, not the processing. The mental realm does affect the physical, but according to epiphenomalists, it is not the mental states which do this but the mental functioning which can be potentially described in terms of or in abidance of physical neural processes.

Epiphenomalism 4 - Anti-epiphenomalism 0

“ Green (2003) has argued that epiphenomenalism does not even provide a satisfactory ‘out’ from the problem of interaction posed by substance dualism. According to Green, epiphenomenalism implies a one-way form of interactionism that is just as hard to conceive of as the two-way form embodied in substance dualism. If it is a problem how mental events can causally influence physical events, how is it any less of a problem how physical events can influence mental ones? Green suggests that the assumption that it is less of a problem may arise from the unexamined belief that physical events have some sort of primacy over mental ones. ”

The physical events preceed the mental states. The physical states which lead to stimuli influence the mind functions (which then influences the minds states). In fact, during gestation, it is these physical states which create the mind (functions->states) itself. The pattern of the functions determines how the mind "feels", but it is these same functions which then govern the rest of the body as well. The "feeling" alone is not enough to govern the body as a whole. Awareness of the rest of the body is simply a feedback mechanism through the senses which influences the mind's functions and states yet more. Kmarinas86 01:44, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chemical reactions.

I have removed a passage that is possibly OR and definitely full of holes.

Life and its environment consist of numerous physical and chemical reactions, or a simple total reaction that goes on and on. Every such reaction that takes place in the present is based on the ones that have happened before.

"based on" need not mean detemrined by.

Similarly, each and every "decision" a person makes is dependent entirely on previous events, when he/she had to make other "decisions". Our own life(in our own terms) appears as a mind quest where we "choose" the best(according to us) in every situation, thus creating the illusion of free will. Problem with this scenario stem from the following considerations: with regards to the incipient "tabula rasa" or unborn stage of the life of any human,

The tabula rasa theory is not "just true.

he/she certainly does not have the possibility of making any choice at all. A person does not "decide" how their appearance will be, what time will they be born, the place where they live and even the food they eat in the mother's womb and in the first years of their life. We may safely affirm that in the beginning, each and every particular characteristic of one's life is not chosen by he or she.

The intended conclusion that there are no decisions in the middle either does no follow--without supplementary assumptions like determinism.

Moving further in time, it is impossible to pinpoint a moment in someone's life when they actually start making the first conscient "decision".

So? You probably can't pinpoint the first memory either.

All the life's events, the universal chemical reaction or the great "atomic soup" in which our bodies also exist are thus foreordained and may not happen otherwise.

This is essentially an incompatibilist argument against free will, not an argument for epiphenomenalism. Consciousness might exert deterministic causality. Or it might be identical to "chemical reactions". 1Z 22:58, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Arguments Against

In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett argues that the no-free-will conclusion is based on naive dubious about the location of consciousness.

Presumably this meant to say naive beliefs or naive, but dubious, beliefs or something similar? I hesitate to alter it, as I haven't read the book...--Dependent Variable.

[edit] Ordering

While I can't think of anything better, subject-opponents-arguements for-arguements agaibnst seems a bit clumsy. Maybe subject-pro arguements critics-anti arguements? Or reverse the last two? Or possibly even merge the critical responses and arguemtns against Larklight (talk) 19:34, 30 January 2008 (UTC)