(I think in paragraph 6 of "Evolutionary arguments (the good kind)" you meant to switch the interactionist and epiphenomenalist, unless I didn't understand something.)
Epiphenomenalism is perfectly compatible with consciousness as an evolutionary byproduct, similar to music appreciation and religiosity. Natural affect, language, higher order cognition, memory and other faculties could, in some combination, produce first order experience, without consciousness itself playing any causal role. I'm inclined against it given the vital role consciousness independently has for cultural and social learning, but we don't really have a zombie control species to test against.
The arguments against it don't have much strength. Spandrels are pretty entrenched in biology, so evolutionary arguments aren’t defeaters. And epiphenomenalism is compatible with reasonably inferring other minds based on self-reflection, behavior (the abilities noted above that consciousness can be attributed to), internal mechanisms, and simplicity, even though consciousness would be only a by-product that has no independent causal role. Nipples don't need to do anything for me to infer that other men have nipples.
Although like most so-called explanations for consciousness, epiphenomenalism doesn't at all get us to an explanation for consciousness.
I found this article that looks at the common objections (namely denying individual agency) to epiphenominalism and gives some weakened forms of the theory. The author is not an epiphenominalist, but thinks the theory has been unfairly attacked and is widely used as a philosophical boogeyman.
Wonderfull article, it moved me from Epiphenomenalism is absurd to possible. I'm a bit sad your objection to Type 1 Panpsychism is just introspective sense data indicates consciousness is more unified than purely physical laws would indicate. Applying sense data to the behavior of atoms seems to be simply incorrect. There is no plausible way my unaugmented touch sense data of my arm, or my hearing sense data of sound etc would lead to a correct understanding of the interactions of the strong an weak forces, of charge and spin.
Glibly, "My body is coherent and unified. Proposing that it is nothing over and above a bunch of simple atoms interacting is obviously false". If the interaction of atoms can make seemingly coherent objects why not seemingly coherent Qualia.
I think many would argue introspection is objective in a way other sense data is not, this seems untrue but I don't have an super strong argument for that
I’m sympathetic to your points about panpsychism. Panpsychism would be a novel solution to the problem of consciousness if what you call View 1 were plausible—or at least significantly more plausible than type-A materialism—but it isn’t. View 2 and View 3 are just plain-old dualism, plus the gratuitous claim that atoms are conscious.
I think Huemer could just accept premise 3 in the argument you attribute to him, even as applied to morality. A phenomenal conservative can accept moral truths for reasons that have nothing to do with their purported ability to explain human behavior.
I still need to read that Yetter-Chappell paper, but I wonder if the solution you discuss just pushes the problem back a step. Zombies and phenomenally conscious people will have different belief contents on this account, but how do I know which content my beliefs have if the difference is causally irrelevant? How can I come to know which content my beliefs have—the zombie content or the phenomenally conscious content—if there’s no causal difference between then? I suspect there’s still a puzzle lurking here, although I’m not sure how to articulate it. It probably depends on one’s views about more general issues related to mental content.
Consider the doctrine of parallelism - that anything that goes in our minds is completely parallel to and has no correlation to what goes on in our brains. If the reason you reject this view in favor of epiphenomenalism is because our mental states are obviously caused by our brain states, then you should also maintain that mental states obviously cause our reports about them - because there is no parallelism between the mind and brain, but instead there is a very clearly harmonious dualist interactionism occurring between them. Brains cause mental experiences of pain, mental experiences of pain cause you to report on the quale of that mental experience.
>Even if the epiphenomenalist doesn’t have a great exact theory of why we talk about consciousness, it isn’t hard to imagine that there would be some explanation. The epiphenomenalist doesn’t need a fully worked-out picture, just a reason to think that such a solution isn’t terribly implausible.
If there is a sharp divide between the mental and the physical, it is impossible for there to be such an explanation, because the mental doesn't cause any physical changes at all - this is just what epiphenomenalism means. If you don't hold that this sharp divide is insurmountable, then you should be an interactionist.
>But once you have a physical system that talks about experiences that it’s directly acquainted with, you have consciousness talk.
"Directly acquainted" in this sentence is functioning as a label for your resolution to the epiphenomenalists-have-no-explanation-for-conscious-talk-problem - except without giving any sort of content to what the resolution is supposed to be, other than that you would use the words "directly acquainted" to label it. You could replace "directly acquainted" with "magically intertwined" and have just as uninformative a stipulation.
If beliefs depend on experiences, doesn't that disprove epiphenomenalism? The "belief" is, in this view, caused by a state of the brain, which would be caused by a phenomenal state (the experience), which would mean consciousness does cause things after all.
Another objection I once thought of is that the brain is an incoherent gibbering mess, while the mind very much isn't: why isn't the mind like the brain? The mind could be anything at all under epiphenomenalism since it does nothing. Huxley once said the mind is like the steam leaving a locomotive, but steam is pure chaos, unlike the mind.
Personally, I am of the view there are no coherent views of consciousness at all, so it doesn't matter if other views have the same issues.
The theory I want to put forward is called dual-aspect neutral monism. The idea is that the physical is the way things look from the outside, and the mental is the way some things look from the inside. The two "way things look" clauses are the two aspects. Aspects are relative. The outer aspect, the physical aspect, is the relation between a thing and something external to it. The inner aspect are, the mental aspect, is the relation between a thing and. itself, the perspective a system has on itself, the perspective you can only get by Being There.
According to thus theory, reality, in itself, apart from any relation to it or perspective on it, is neither physical nor mental, it is neutral: that is why the theory of dual aspects is always connected with neutral monism. Both the physical and the mental perspective can be used to give casual accounts: one can explain an "ouch!" as the result of neural firing, or as the result of a pain quale. This is not the assertion that there are two kinds of causality operating in the territory, in the map, it is the assertion that causal accounts are a tied to maps -- what causality really is, we cannot say , absent a map.
One of the advantages of dual aspect theory is that the equivalence, the synchronization between physical events, events as physically described, and mental events, is natural consequence of the theory, requiring no special additional apparatus.
To use an analogy, if two spectators at a football match watch the same game from opposite ends of a stadium, they will have different views of it, but they will both see a goal at the same time....their perspectives are perspectives on the same basic events.
Excellent article, as usual!
(I think in paragraph 6 of "Evolutionary arguments (the good kind)" you meant to switch the interactionist and epiphenomenalist, unless I didn't understand something.)
Epiphenomenalism is perfectly compatible with consciousness as an evolutionary byproduct, similar to music appreciation and religiosity. Natural affect, language, higher order cognition, memory and other faculties could, in some combination, produce first order experience, without consciousness itself playing any causal role. I'm inclined against it given the vital role consciousness independently has for cultural and social learning, but we don't really have a zombie control species to test against.
The arguments against it don't have much strength. Spandrels are pretty entrenched in biology, so evolutionary arguments aren’t defeaters. And epiphenomenalism is compatible with reasonably inferring other minds based on self-reflection, behavior (the abilities noted above that consciousness can be attributed to), internal mechanisms, and simplicity, even though consciousness would be only a by-product that has no independent causal role. Nipples don't need to do anything for me to infer that other men have nipples.
Although like most so-called explanations for consciousness, epiphenomenalism doesn't at all get us to an explanation for consciousness.
I found this article that looks at the common objections (namely denying individual agency) to epiphenominalism and gives some weakened forms of the theory. The author is not an epiphenominalist, but thinks the theory has been unfairly attacked and is widely used as a philosophical boogeyman.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02911-w#Sec2
Wonderfull article, it moved me from Epiphenomenalism is absurd to possible. I'm a bit sad your objection to Type 1 Panpsychism is just introspective sense data indicates consciousness is more unified than purely physical laws would indicate. Applying sense data to the behavior of atoms seems to be simply incorrect. There is no plausible way my unaugmented touch sense data of my arm, or my hearing sense data of sound etc would lead to a correct understanding of the interactions of the strong an weak forces, of charge and spin.
Glibly, "My body is coherent and unified. Proposing that it is nothing over and above a bunch of simple atoms interacting is obviously false". If the interaction of atoms can make seemingly coherent objects why not seemingly coherent Qualia.
I think many would argue introspection is objective in a way other sense data is not, this seems untrue but I don't have an super strong argument for that
I’m sympathetic to your points about panpsychism. Panpsychism would be a novel solution to the problem of consciousness if what you call View 1 were plausible—or at least significantly more plausible than type-A materialism—but it isn’t. View 2 and View 3 are just plain-old dualism, plus the gratuitous claim that atoms are conscious.
I think Huemer could just accept premise 3 in the argument you attribute to him, even as applied to morality. A phenomenal conservative can accept moral truths for reasons that have nothing to do with their purported ability to explain human behavior.
I still need to read that Yetter-Chappell paper, but I wonder if the solution you discuss just pushes the problem back a step. Zombies and phenomenally conscious people will have different belief contents on this account, but how do I know which content my beliefs have if the difference is causally irrelevant? How can I come to know which content my beliefs have—the zombie content or the phenomenally conscious content—if there’s no causal difference between then? I suspect there’s still a puzzle lurking here, although I’m not sure how to articulate it. It probably depends on one’s views about more general issues related to mental content.
Consider the doctrine of parallelism - that anything that goes in our minds is completely parallel to and has no correlation to what goes on in our brains. If the reason you reject this view in favor of epiphenomenalism is because our mental states are obviously caused by our brain states, then you should also maintain that mental states obviously cause our reports about them - because there is no parallelism between the mind and brain, but instead there is a very clearly harmonious dualist interactionism occurring between them. Brains cause mental experiences of pain, mental experiences of pain cause you to report on the quale of that mental experience.
>Even if the epiphenomenalist doesn’t have a great exact theory of why we talk about consciousness, it isn’t hard to imagine that there would be some explanation. The epiphenomenalist doesn’t need a fully worked-out picture, just a reason to think that such a solution isn’t terribly implausible.
If there is a sharp divide between the mental and the physical, it is impossible for there to be such an explanation, because the mental doesn't cause any physical changes at all - this is just what epiphenomenalism means. If you don't hold that this sharp divide is insurmountable, then you should be an interactionist.
>But once you have a physical system that talks about experiences that it’s directly acquainted with, you have consciousness talk.
"Directly acquainted" in this sentence is functioning as a label for your resolution to the epiphenomenalists-have-no-explanation-for-conscious-talk-problem - except without giving any sort of content to what the resolution is supposed to be, other than that you would use the words "directly acquainted" to label it. You could replace "directly acquainted" with "magically intertwined" and have just as uninformative a stipulation.
If beliefs depend on experiences, doesn't that disprove epiphenomenalism? The "belief" is, in this view, caused by a state of the brain, which would be caused by a phenomenal state (the experience), which would mean consciousness does cause things after all.
Another objection I once thought of is that the brain is an incoherent gibbering mess, while the mind very much isn't: why isn't the mind like the brain? The mind could be anything at all under epiphenomenalism since it does nothing. Huxley once said the mind is like the steam leaving a locomotive, but steam is pure chaos, unlike the mind.
Personally, I am of the view there are no coherent views of consciousness at all, so it doesn't matter if other views have the same issues.
There's another way physicalism can be wrong, that avoids the problems of eliminativism, interactionism , epiphenomenalism, and occasionalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-aspect_theory
The theory I want to put forward is called dual-aspect neutral monism. The idea is that the physical is the way things look from the outside, and the mental is the way some things look from the inside. The two "way things look" clauses are the two aspects. Aspects are relative. The outer aspect, the physical aspect, is the relation between a thing and something external to it. The inner aspect are, the mental aspect, is the relation between a thing and. itself, the perspective a system has on itself, the perspective you can only get by Being There.
According to thus theory, reality, in itself, apart from any relation to it or perspective on it, is neither physical nor mental, it is neutral: that is why the theory of dual aspects is always connected with neutral monism. Both the physical and the mental perspective can be used to give casual accounts: one can explain an "ouch!" as the result of neural firing, or as the result of a pain quale. This is not the assertion that there are two kinds of causality operating in the territory, in the map, it is the assertion that causal accounts are a tied to maps -- what causality really is, we cannot say , absent a map.
One of the advantages of dual aspect theory is that the equivalence, the synchronization between physical events, events as physically described, and mental events, is natural consequence of the theory, requiring no special additional apparatus.
To use an analogy, if two spectators at a football match watch the same game from opposite ends of a stadium, they will have different views of it, but they will both see a goal at the same time....their perspectives are perspectives on the same basic events.