An important consequence of epiphenomenalism is that while the conscience is real, the assessment of conscience in other beings is impossible for Science.
Thank you for your comment and the link to your article.
I might agree that the illusion of free-will is inescapable consequence of physicalism, I'm not sure why I should believe that epiphenomenalism is? Why do you make this claim? I genuinely interested in your ideas.
Well, as long as everything is determined by the laws of physics and conscience is inmediately real and directly coordinated with matter (your physical arm and your mental instruction to move the arm are always coordinated), you get epiphenomenalism.
Chalmers is the academic version, but Greg Egan (the Science fiction writer) in Axiomatic is even more enlightening. This short story is the best ever exposition of epiphenomenalism:
I understand why Chalmers makes his claims. I've just never found them to be convincing. To me, his ideas seem to cause more problems than they explain. One of the most fascinating things about consciousness theories is that every theory seems (at least to someone) to have problems. Each person finds the problems they are happy to live with or they convince themselves that their theory's problems are not really problems.
Let’s take this problem: “The utterance, ‘I feel that I am conscious’, can only be caused by my physical body. In this framework, my non-physical consciousness is mute—it cannot directly influence my physical actions or communicate its presence. It exists in silence, unable to tell my physical body of its existence or its experiences.”
The mind is not “mute” because epiphenomenalism. You say those words, in the sense that part of the conscious experience is the experience of control.
It is an “illusion” but from a Cartesian (or Berkelian) perspective illusions are more real than anything else, perhaps the only real thing.
While matter is the cause of everything, what really matters is conscience. Freedom (my paper is about that), is illusory but it makes sense, as much as the natural numbers or a Hamiltonian.
But according to epiphenomenalism, the non-physical consciousness has no influence -- no causal effects on anything physical.
So, one thing we can know for sure is that the physical act of saying "I feel that I am conscious" CAN NOT be caused by my non-physical consciousness. Because my non-physical consciousness, according to epiphenomenalism, has no physical effects -- at all. It doesn't cause anything physical.
So i could say "I feel that I am conscious" but this would actually be caused by my unconscious physical brain -- not by my non-physical consciousness.
It seems to me that if you think that epiphenomenalism is not mute in that it can cause the physical act of saying "I feel that I am conscious", then we're back at substance dualism, no?
Causal relations inside the physical world are intuitive. But conscience and atoms happen are ontologically different. There physical causes in the physical world between the neural computation and the words said. Those are real and physical; they also produce your conscient experience, an ontologically different thing.
The use of “causality” across ontological domains probably is the cause of the perplexity.
Perhaps a simple way to avoid the problems is avoid the idea of matter as “cause” in terms of time. Matter and conscience are perfectly coordinated, and given that matter is autonomous, everything in the “other side” is determined by what happens in the material world.
I don’t see any real logical problem to epiphenomenalism, and more over, if you believe in the closure of the physical reality, I see it as inevitable. I really cannot even imagine an alternative.
I understand why people wish to include a non-physical mind. It certainly seems to fit with the intuitive notions of consciousness. But logically, I struggle with the necessity of a non-physical mind that has no effects.
This is a powerful point. I think I fall in this category. When I started reading your post I thought I agreed with Epiphenomenalism but the placebo effect eviscerates this position. I think I may have misinterpreted Searle because I think I believed he is an epi guy though I didn’t know this flavor of consciousness theory. I agreed with Searle because he argued the mind is a backfire from the brain with no supernatural capacity, and that gets him a win over Descartes. Searle doesn’t care whether free will exists; we behave as if it exists and that’s proof enough.
But somehow consciousness must exist in a physical relationship with the brain. If I want to go for a run, an impulse that forms from brain activity, I run, and my brain does its thing to balance my body, monitor the asphalt for slicks or glass, increase my heart rate and oxygen consumption. I don’t experience fear because the impulse which formed in the brain and reached the level of consciousness went back to the brain which knows I’m running. If I start getting chased by a dog, my brain forms an impulse to get my body to safety and so now I sense fear at a conscious level.
But I still don’t think AI has consciousness, really, but I see where one might think AI can simulate it. It doesn’t self-generate impulses to run or read or eat or have sex. It depends upon human input, which has the brain capacity to generate impulses from memory, recent states of consciousness
I’m starting to get it (I hope). I definitely was working hard to defend a position I understood from Searle because it suited what I’m trying to do as a literacy educator. You are an excellent teacher! Any obvious stupidity in this comment is entirely my fault:)
Thanks, Terry! I'm honoured that you are including my articles in your readings on the topic, and thrilled to hear that you are finding them useful. It's tricky, this consciousness thing, isn't it!?
🤣 I'm not sure my thoughts matter too much. But I am a scientist, so I guess it's not too surprising that my views on consciousness tend to align with a physical explanation. That being said, consciousness is a challenging topic -- perhaps the most challenging. So, I try not to take a dogmatic position. There's a lot of fun to be had in reading, learning and being challenged by other people's ideas.
Agreed. If you aren't familiar yet, I highly recommend Mark Solms and his work. I find his book "The Hidden Spring" to be the best current treatment of consciousness that accounts for both subjectivity/psychology AND the latest in active inference, cognitive science, evolutionary theory, etc.
My model of consciousness is based on what I learned in `The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science` by Culadasa (AKA Dr John Charles Yates PhD).
The mind is recursive in its processing. The physical senses process inputs subconsciously and filter out the useful bits and present it to your consciousness. Your consciousness is to be seen as a board room where all parts of the mind connect and share notes. Until the experience bubbles up into the board room, each thought is isolated. But it becomes known to the entire mind only once you think it.
There are various subsystems for your awareness. When you focus on something, most people think of that focus as themself and it feels like a camera. As your attention jumps from place to place, it's almost like a spotlight. That's the first part of awareness.
The second part of awareness is more diffuse. It's your peripheral vision, so to speak. When the five senses bring something into mind, or when your own thinking mind (or perhaps planning mind) comes up with a memory or an idea, then your peripheral awareness hears about it. But so do all your other senses. If you notice a bird chirping, it might influence your sight or smell. If you hear a sound, it might be danger and your mind recruits your other senses to confirm it.
And the last part of awareness is what I'd like to call the director. You might be working on something and intently focused on it, when suddenly you're distracted. Your attention shifts. You see or hear a notification on your cellphone, you hear the doorbell, anything that your director deems important or more interesting.
When you meditate, you're practising the art of focus. You're training your director to prevent it from shifting focus away from your breath or meditation object. When a thought pops up, you don't drift away from the breath. Instead, you may hold that thought in your peripheral awareness while staying focused on the breath.
Consciousness therefore is the interplay between your priorities for focus and awareness. You only become aware of external senses or stray thoughts when your subconscious doesn't know what to do with that input, or feels that it is important for you to become aware of it.
Combine this with the work of Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. She thinks that your mind is a neural network and it simply has the job of predicting the future. All emotions are your mind deciding what to do with a possible upcoming event and creating an energy model to help you navigate that event.
For example, let's take anger. Someone gives you bad news and you feel the emotion bubble up. If you're a man and someone has threatened you somehow, you might get lots of energy and prepare to fight. The same man on another day while sick won't have the same response because he doesn't have the energy requirements. The same situation with a small woman facing dangerous odds will still become angry, but she might seethe quietly and plot revenge.
Same situation, different parameters, different energy requirements, different needs and solutions.
Emotions are then perceived by the mind and categorised according to what they feel like. Depending on your own emotional skills, your consciousness will interpret those signals differently.
For example, In both excitement and fear, you get adrenaline spiking. They both have the same chemical profile but the mental difference is in interpretation.
It reminds me a lot of the Global Workspace Theory which is currently one of the more popular scientific theories of consciousness. But more than that, it aligns nicely with an attentional view of consciousness and the predictive coding theory of the brain, which is exactly my research area.
I think there is some truth to the fact that sometimes (maybe even most of the time) our conscious mind is more like a press secretary, seeking to explain our actions, rather than an executive that chooses actions
But I don’t think this is due to a lack of free will, but rather, a lack of awareness and lack of processing power.
We can’t make every decision consciously. We have to outsource a lot of our decision making to the unconscious mind in order to free up latency for mission critical tasks
So while I agree that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of evolution, I would disagree that it does not affect our day to day decision making for two reasons:
1) we can strengthen awareness and make more deliberate decisions with practice (meditation)
2) quantum theory posits that the future is unknowable because we can never know the velocity and mass of objects at the same time. Once we can, the object collapses into reality (the present moment)
Due to this paradox of a probabilistic future, the strict determinist argument that there is no free will and everything is based on causality breaks down, because there is always a probability of randomness in the system.
This leads me to think that while sometimes we make choices unconsciously, that does not mean that consciousness plays no role in our lives, decisions and actions. It’s a narrator, but it’s also an executive
Thanks so much, Matthew! These are all great points.
I just have one thought. Perhaps you've heard the counter-argument against the claim that quantum randomness leaves open the possibility of free-will. The strict determinist might argue that there's no free-will in randomness. Would you have a counter-counter claim?
This might be philosophical but I would argue you still have agency even if randomness is acting upon you. Things happen, but you can choose how to react to them
In that way, I’d argue free will still exists and simply because randomness exists in the system does not negate your ability to choose the best decision given the circumstances
In fact, I’d argue that, evolutionarily, that’s why consciousness exists. To make new decisions and mental models in a dynamic environment
All the articles in this series so far have been stellar! They have pushed my thinking about consciousness to new limits and I can't wait for the next (hoping there is another part coming). If I may suggest, these articles can go as chapters of a possible future bestseller. I highly recommend reaching out to publishers with this work, or go independently if you prefer more freedom. If you turn this into a book, I am definitely buying.
My thoughts exactly. Suzi has magical way of making the most difficult topics accessible. I came to Substack because of this newsletter. I’d also buy any book that Suzi writes.
"...when you reach for that cookie in the cookie jar, it’s not because you want a cookie. Nope. Your thoughts and wants have nothing to do with it."
Finally, someone hands me the bulletproof excuse I always needed. Thank you, epiphenomenalism. You're indeed epically phenomenal!
Jokes aside, thank you for another thorough article. I enjoyed it. Or at least my physical brain forced my body to automatically type these words claiming that I did.
Great work! You can gauge your impact by the quality of the comments section. I really appreciate your commentary in Section 3, Part 3. Your writing there is very fresh and exploratory. My first degrees were in the Classics and Medieval Studies. A lot of these later debates feel very antique. The shadow of Platonism divide between body and soul. There are also elements of the Scholastics occasional causation here... a more correlational kind of interaction between cause and effect. I like how the series and Substack appear to be building to physicalism and free will. Looking forward to seeing how you bring this back around to AI!
Thanks, Nick! Your comments are insightful as always. Much of our modern conceptions of consciousness, identity, reality, and free-will have been deeply influenced by the classics. Despite centuries of technological and scientific advancement, we still seem to be grappling with questions framed by these views -- how does the mind and body relate?, what is the nature of consciousness?, and how we reconcile determinism with our sense of free-will? Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift?
I always found it hard to see what epiphenomenalism added to reductionism, from strong identity theories to weaker supervenience accounts, or Davidson's thing with anomalous monism.
You "explain' conscious experience, sort of, but it doesn't do anything, and without any sort of casual interactions it's hard to see that accounting for anything worth caring about.
Even eliminativism is more consistent. It's hard to defend in other ways, but at least it takes its physicalist commitments seriously.
The problem I think is less to do with finding the right theory of consciousness and more to do with asking why subjectivity is such a puzzle -- and why we believe we'll solve it with the same basic methods that got us into it (those being Cartesianism and empiricism).
I'm enjoying this series quite a bit! A great overview of some key facets!
Mary's Room: horrific for poor Mary! Mark me down as not buying it as an argument against physicalism because even under *materialism* (let alone physicalism), it seems clear there is a difference between Mary's knowledge *about* color and her knowledge of the *experience* of color. The flaw here is the assumption that Mary can know everything about color prior to her experience of it. Mary can know the brain states of experience exist, but those states of knowledge are different from the brain states of the experience itself.
>> "Your wanting to have a cookie is just an afterthought, a narrative your brain spins up to explain your actions."
I've always thought it sounds similar to Illusionism, and my objection is also similar. If the brain is generating a consciousness narrative, even if that narrative is epiphenomenal or an "illusion", isn't the brain still doing that mysterious heavy lifting of generating subjectivity?
Why does the brain lack free will but the narrative it generates doesn't? If it can generate a narrative of choice, why do we think it's not actually making those choices? What's more parsimonious, that it generates a narrative in accord with its actions, or that it spins an elaborate fake?
Ha, I knew this article would touch on the Libet experiments. Same objection. That my brain shows the low-level activity of choosing to act before my high-level consciousness is fully aware of it implies a dualism I don't buy. Under physicalism, my brain/mind is a unified object. We grant a lot of higher intelligence to our subconscious mind and dreams. Why do we assume our parts are so separate from our whole?
As an aside, an amazing thing about the placebo effect is that it's been shown to work even when the patient knows they are getting a placebo. Merely getting medical attention has been shown to be beneficial -- transferring your worries to the doctor.
I enjoyed your breakdown of the Mary in the Black and White Room thought experiment. I agree, I've never found that thought experiment very persuasive. It's an appeal to intuition that doesn't fit with my intuition. Actually, that is probably true for most of the consciousness thought experiments. The analogies always breakdown at some point.
This was great thanks Suzi. I am interested to know if there is a term to describe a variant of Epiphonemonalism where, yes consciousness is a by-product, but it is also used as an input to future actions rather than consciousness now not affecting future consciousness?
What a great question. The answer is going to depend on what you think consciousness is. If, like the Epiphenomenalist, you think that consciousness is not a physical thing -- then you have two main options.
One, is dualism. This idea would be that there two types of stuff, physical stuff (like brains) and non-physical stuff (like minds). You could take the view that somehow the non-physical mind and the physical brain interact (this would be interactive dualism). I've linked to my substance dualism article below. But in short, the big problem the interactive dualist faces is how a non-physical thing interacts with the physical world. According to the laws of physics, to influence things (make changes in the world) is a property of being physical. Non-physical things, by definition, don't have these properties that physical things have.
Alternatively, you could take the view that the non-physical mind doesn't actually interact with the physical brain. They run in parallel. The brain does not influence the mind and the mind does not influence the brain. To me, this sort of idea must contend with similar objections that epiphenomenalism faces.
If you are leaning towards the idea that consciousness is non-physical there is another form of dualism that might fit with your thinking -- property dualism. This is the idea that while there is no extra substance beyond the physical brain. The brain is special. It has special properties that no other type of physical thing has. And these special properties are not physical things. So, the property of having a pain is a property of the brain. They are thought to be non-physical because they can't be reduced to the brain in the way that other physical things can (e.g. we can reduce water to H2O). People who believe in this view usually believe that we will need a completely new type of science if we have any hope in explaining consciousness. If you are leaning towards this view, you might find my article on What Exists and What is Imagined, an interesting read.
The second option (if you decide the mind is non-physical) is some form of idealism. This idea is that there is only one thing -- mind stuff -- physical things are entirely constructed by the mind. I haven't spent too much time discussing idealism. But I did write an article on one form of idealism -- solipsism, which is the idea that the only thing that exists is you.
If, on the other hand, you decide that the non-physical mind doesn't make much sense, then you will probably find your answer in some form of physicalism -- the idea that (somehow) consciousness can be fully explained by the physical world. If you decide to go down that path, there are many different versions of physicalism to explore (e.g. behaviourism, the mind-brain identity theory, functionalism, biological naturalism, panpsychism, quantum theory of consciousness, and many, many, scientific theories of consciousness).
I can't thank you enough for taking the time to explain this in detail. Thank you so much for delving into the different theories. I feel inspired to go deeper on this. Interestingly, I can see positives in the notion behind all the theories you have expressed (even idealism).
The interesting subtlety with a physicalist explanation of consciousness is that we would also need to explain what the experience of a sense is too (I believe). Because why should the experience of even a simple sense be possible at all. This is almost a precursor to the bigger question of consciousness.
I'm going to make my way through all your articles now, and will no doubt how more questions or comments to add along the way (if you don't mind :))
Very interesting. I have a question maybe you can elaborate further. I am struggling to understand the difference between Epiphenomenalism as you explained it and a view in which the mind doesn't exist at all/is just an illusion. Are these two positions the same and if not how do Epiphenomenalists explain the existence of a non physical entity "consciousness"?
I wasn't so sure because most of the article sounded like these positions might be the same but then "Your wanting to have a cookie is just an afterthought, a narrative your brain spins up to explain your actions" sounded like the mind actually exists separate in Epiphenomenalism although just as a passive observer/commentator.
Great question! Both interpretations would have the same effect, right!? In the philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is often seen as a form of dualism — consciousness exists, it just has no effects. It might be seen as a way to avoid the interaction problem inherent in Descartes substance dualism.
But in everyday use, the term epiphenomenalism might be used to mean consciousness doesn’t exist. Although, in the philosophy that view is called eliminativism (or eliminative materialism).
Thank you for clarification. Makes sense - to me it also looks like its a kind of dualism where consciousness is just not very active avoiding the interaction problem.
Epiphenomenalism is an inescapable consequence of physicalism.
The canonical reference is “the conscious mind” de David Chalmers, while I would recommend my own article for a short introduction.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nY7oAdy5odfGqE7mQ/freedom-under-naturalistic-dualism
An important consequence of epiphenomenalism is that while the conscience is real, the assessment of conscience in other beings is impossible for Science.
Thank you for your comment and the link to your article.
I might agree that the illusion of free-will is inescapable consequence of physicalism, I'm not sure why I should believe that epiphenomenalism is? Why do you make this claim? I genuinely interested in your ideas.
Well, as long as everything is determined by the laws of physics and conscience is inmediately real and directly coordinated with matter (your physical arm and your mental instruction to move the arm are always coordinated), you get epiphenomenalism.
Chalmers is the academic version, but Greg Egan (the Science fiction writer) in Axiomatic is even more enlightening. This short story is the best ever exposition of epiphenomenalism:
https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me.pdf
I understand why Chalmers makes his claims. I've just never found them to be convincing. To me, his ideas seem to cause more problems than they explain. One of the most fascinating things about consciousness theories is that every theory seems (at least to someone) to have problems. Each person finds the problems they are happy to live with or they convince themselves that their theory's problems are not really problems.
Let’s take this problem: “The utterance, ‘I feel that I am conscious’, can only be caused by my physical body. In this framework, my non-physical consciousness is mute—it cannot directly influence my physical actions or communicate its presence. It exists in silence, unable to tell my physical body of its existence or its experiences.”
The mind is not “mute” because epiphenomenalism. You say those words, in the sense that part of the conscious experience is the experience of control.
It is an “illusion” but from a Cartesian (or Berkelian) perspective illusions are more real than anything else, perhaps the only real thing.
While matter is the cause of everything, what really matters is conscience. Freedom (my paper is about that), is illusory but it makes sense, as much as the natural numbers or a Hamiltonian.
But according to epiphenomenalism, the non-physical consciousness has no influence -- no causal effects on anything physical.
So, one thing we can know for sure is that the physical act of saying "I feel that I am conscious" CAN NOT be caused by my non-physical consciousness. Because my non-physical consciousness, according to epiphenomenalism, has no physical effects -- at all. It doesn't cause anything physical.
So i could say "I feel that I am conscious" but this would actually be caused by my unconscious physical brain -- not by my non-physical consciousness.
It seems to me that if you think that epiphenomenalism is not mute in that it can cause the physical act of saying "I feel that I am conscious", then we're back at substance dualism, no?
Causal relations inside the physical world are intuitive. But conscience and atoms happen are ontologically different. There physical causes in the physical world between the neural computation and the words said. Those are real and physical; they also produce your conscient experience, an ontologically different thing.
The use of “causality” across ontological domains probably is the cause of the perplexity.
Perhaps a simple way to avoid the problems is avoid the idea of matter as “cause” in terms of time. Matter and conscience are perfectly coordinated, and given that matter is autonomous, everything in the “other side” is determined by what happens in the material world.
I don’t see any real logical problem to epiphenomenalism, and more over, if you believe in the closure of the physical reality, I see it as inevitable. I really cannot even imagine an alternative.
It is, of course, uncomfortable.
I understand why people wish to include a non-physical mind. It certainly seems to fit with the intuitive notions of consciousness. But logically, I struggle with the necessity of a non-physical mind that has no effects.
This is a powerful point. I think I fall in this category. When I started reading your post I thought I agreed with Epiphenomenalism but the placebo effect eviscerates this position. I think I may have misinterpreted Searle because I think I believed he is an epi guy though I didn’t know this flavor of consciousness theory. I agreed with Searle because he argued the mind is a backfire from the brain with no supernatural capacity, and that gets him a win over Descartes. Searle doesn’t care whether free will exists; we behave as if it exists and that’s proof enough.
But somehow consciousness must exist in a physical relationship with the brain. If I want to go for a run, an impulse that forms from brain activity, I run, and my brain does its thing to balance my body, monitor the asphalt for slicks or glass, increase my heart rate and oxygen consumption. I don’t experience fear because the impulse which formed in the brain and reached the level of consciousness went back to the brain which knows I’m running. If I start getting chased by a dog, my brain forms an impulse to get my body to safety and so now I sense fear at a conscious level.
But I still don’t think AI has consciousness, really, but I see where one might think AI can simulate it. It doesn’t self-generate impulses to run or read or eat or have sex. It depends upon human input, which has the brain capacity to generate impulses from memory, recent states of consciousness
I’m starting to get it (I hope). I definitely was working hard to defend a position I understood from Searle because it suited what I’m trying to do as a literacy educator. You are an excellent teacher! Any obvious stupidity in this comment is entirely my fault:)
Thanks, Terry! I'm honoured that you are including my articles in your readings on the topic, and thrilled to hear that you are finding them useful. It's tricky, this consciousness thing, isn't it!?
These are great explanations, but when will we find out what SUZI thinks about all of these controversial ideas??
🤣 I'm not sure my thoughts matter too much. But I am a scientist, so I guess it's not too surprising that my views on consciousness tend to align with a physical explanation. That being said, consciousness is a challenging topic -- perhaps the most challenging. So, I try not to take a dogmatic position. There's a lot of fun to be had in reading, learning and being challenged by other people's ideas.
Agreed. If you aren't familiar yet, I highly recommend Mark Solms and his work. I find his book "The Hidden Spring" to be the best current treatment of consciousness that accounts for both subjectivity/psychology AND the latest in active inference, cognitive science, evolutionary theory, etc.
Yes, Mark does really interesting work on dreaming, right!? I haven't read his book yet, but you've just reminded me to add it to my list.
My model of consciousness is based on what I learned in `The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science` by Culadasa (AKA Dr John Charles Yates PhD).
The mind is recursive in its processing. The physical senses process inputs subconsciously and filter out the useful bits and present it to your consciousness. Your consciousness is to be seen as a board room where all parts of the mind connect and share notes. Until the experience bubbles up into the board room, each thought is isolated. But it becomes known to the entire mind only once you think it.
There are various subsystems for your awareness. When you focus on something, most people think of that focus as themself and it feels like a camera. As your attention jumps from place to place, it's almost like a spotlight. That's the first part of awareness.
The second part of awareness is more diffuse. It's your peripheral vision, so to speak. When the five senses bring something into mind, or when your own thinking mind (or perhaps planning mind) comes up with a memory or an idea, then your peripheral awareness hears about it. But so do all your other senses. If you notice a bird chirping, it might influence your sight or smell. If you hear a sound, it might be danger and your mind recruits your other senses to confirm it.
And the last part of awareness is what I'd like to call the director. You might be working on something and intently focused on it, when suddenly you're distracted. Your attention shifts. You see or hear a notification on your cellphone, you hear the doorbell, anything that your director deems important or more interesting.
When you meditate, you're practising the art of focus. You're training your director to prevent it from shifting focus away from your breath or meditation object. When a thought pops up, you don't drift away from the breath. Instead, you may hold that thought in your peripheral awareness while staying focused on the breath.
Consciousness therefore is the interplay between your priorities for focus and awareness. You only become aware of external senses or stray thoughts when your subconscious doesn't know what to do with that input, or feels that it is important for you to become aware of it.
Combine this with the work of Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. She thinks that your mind is a neural network and it simply has the job of predicting the future. All emotions are your mind deciding what to do with a possible upcoming event and creating an energy model to help you navigate that event.
For example, let's take anger. Someone gives you bad news and you feel the emotion bubble up. If you're a man and someone has threatened you somehow, you might get lots of energy and prepare to fight. The same man on another day while sick won't have the same response because he doesn't have the energy requirements. The same situation with a small woman facing dangerous odds will still become angry, but she might seethe quietly and plot revenge.
Same situation, different parameters, different energy requirements, different needs and solutions.
Emotions are then perceived by the mind and categorised according to what they feel like. Depending on your own emotional skills, your consciousness will interpret those signals differently.
For example, In both excitement and fear, you get adrenaline spiking. They both have the same chemical profile but the mental difference is in interpretation.
This is wonderful, thank you!
It reminds me a lot of the Global Workspace Theory which is currently one of the more popular scientific theories of consciousness. But more than that, it aligns nicely with an attentional view of consciousness and the predictive coding theory of the brain, which is exactly my research area.
Fantastic as always Suzi! Here are my thoughts
I think there is some truth to the fact that sometimes (maybe even most of the time) our conscious mind is more like a press secretary, seeking to explain our actions, rather than an executive that chooses actions
But I don’t think this is due to a lack of free will, but rather, a lack of awareness and lack of processing power.
We can’t make every decision consciously. We have to outsource a lot of our decision making to the unconscious mind in order to free up latency for mission critical tasks
So while I agree that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of evolution, I would disagree that it does not affect our day to day decision making for two reasons:
1) we can strengthen awareness and make more deliberate decisions with practice (meditation)
2) quantum theory posits that the future is unknowable because we can never know the velocity and mass of objects at the same time. Once we can, the object collapses into reality (the present moment)
Due to this paradox of a probabilistic future, the strict determinist argument that there is no free will and everything is based on causality breaks down, because there is always a probability of randomness in the system.
This leads me to think that while sometimes we make choices unconsciously, that does not mean that consciousness plays no role in our lives, decisions and actions. It’s a narrator, but it’s also an executive
Thanks so much, Matthew! These are all great points.
I just have one thought. Perhaps you've heard the counter-argument against the claim that quantum randomness leaves open the possibility of free-will. The strict determinist might argue that there's no free-will in randomness. Would you have a counter-counter claim?
This might be philosophical but I would argue you still have agency even if randomness is acting upon you. Things happen, but you can choose how to react to them
In that way, I’d argue free will still exists and simply because randomness exists in the system does not negate your ability to choose the best decision given the circumstances
In fact, I’d argue that, evolutionarily, that’s why consciousness exists. To make new decisions and mental models in a dynamic environment
I see, this view might be similar to a compatibilist view of free-will -- the idea that free will is compatible with determinism?
Yes that’s an accurate summation. Individuals can make choices and take responsibility for those choices within a causal, deterministic framework
All the articles in this series so far have been stellar! They have pushed my thinking about consciousness to new limits and I can't wait for the next (hoping there is another part coming). If I may suggest, these articles can go as chapters of a possible future bestseller. I highly recommend reaching out to publishers with this work, or go independently if you prefer more freedom. If you turn this into a book, I am definitely buying.
Wow! Thank you so much. I'm a little lost for words.
My thoughts exactly. Suzi has magical way of making the most difficult topics accessible. I came to Substack because of this newsletter. I’d also buy any book that Suzi writes.
Thank you so much. You and @mirhsquadri have made my week! It's comments like these that remind me why I love writing.
btw. You win first prize for best Substack name and an even better Substack handle.
"...when you reach for that cookie in the cookie jar, it’s not because you want a cookie. Nope. Your thoughts and wants have nothing to do with it."
Finally, someone hands me the bulletproof excuse I always needed. Thank you, epiphenomenalism. You're indeed epically phenomenal!
Jokes aside, thank you for another thorough article. I enjoyed it. Or at least my physical brain forced my body to automatically type these words claiming that I did.
You get all the guilt free cookies! That's how it works, right!?
Thank you, Daniel. I always love your comments, they make me laugh out loud every time :)
Great work! You can gauge your impact by the quality of the comments section. I really appreciate your commentary in Section 3, Part 3. Your writing there is very fresh and exploratory. My first degrees were in the Classics and Medieval Studies. A lot of these later debates feel very antique. The shadow of Platonism divide between body and soul. There are also elements of the Scholastics occasional causation here... a more correlational kind of interaction between cause and effect. I like how the series and Substack appear to be building to physicalism and free will. Looking forward to seeing how you bring this back around to AI!
Thanks, Nick! Your comments are insightful as always. Much of our modern conceptions of consciousness, identity, reality, and free-will have been deeply influenced by the classics. Despite centuries of technological and scientific advancement, we still seem to be grappling with questions framed by these views -- how does the mind and body relate?, what is the nature of consciousness?, and how we reconcile determinism with our sense of free-will? Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift?
I always found it hard to see what epiphenomenalism added to reductionism, from strong identity theories to weaker supervenience accounts, or Davidson's thing with anomalous monism.
You "explain' conscious experience, sort of, but it doesn't do anything, and without any sort of casual interactions it's hard to see that accounting for anything worth caring about.
Even eliminativism is more consistent. It's hard to defend in other ways, but at least it takes its physicalist commitments seriously.
The problem I think is less to do with finding the right theory of consciousness and more to do with asking why subjectivity is such a puzzle -- and why we believe we'll solve it with the same basic methods that got us into it (those being Cartesianism and empiricism).
Thanks Matt! Yes, exactly. Well said.
I'm enjoying this series quite a bit! A great overview of some key facets!
Mary's Room: horrific for poor Mary! Mark me down as not buying it as an argument against physicalism because even under *materialism* (let alone physicalism), it seems clear there is a difference between Mary's knowledge *about* color and her knowledge of the *experience* of color. The flaw here is the assumption that Mary can know everything about color prior to her experience of it. Mary can know the brain states of experience exist, but those states of knowledge are different from the brain states of the experience itself.
>> "Your wanting to have a cookie is just an afterthought, a narrative your brain spins up to explain your actions."
I've always thought it sounds similar to Illusionism, and my objection is also similar. If the brain is generating a consciousness narrative, even if that narrative is epiphenomenal or an "illusion", isn't the brain still doing that mysterious heavy lifting of generating subjectivity?
Why does the brain lack free will but the narrative it generates doesn't? If it can generate a narrative of choice, why do we think it's not actually making those choices? What's more parsimonious, that it generates a narrative in accord with its actions, or that it spins an elaborate fake?
Ha, I knew this article would touch on the Libet experiments. Same objection. That my brain shows the low-level activity of choosing to act before my high-level consciousness is fully aware of it implies a dualism I don't buy. Under physicalism, my brain/mind is a unified object. We grant a lot of higher intelligence to our subconscious mind and dreams. Why do we assume our parts are so separate from our whole?
As an aside, an amazing thing about the placebo effect is that it's been shown to work even when the patient knows they are getting a placebo. Merely getting medical attention has been shown to be beneficial -- transferring your worries to the doctor.
Thank you so much! These are great comments!
I enjoyed your breakdown of the Mary in the Black and White Room thought experiment. I agree, I've never found that thought experiment very persuasive. It's an appeal to intuition that doesn't fit with my intuition. Actually, that is probably true for most of the consciousness thought experiments. The analogies always breakdown at some point.
This was great thanks Suzi. I am interested to know if there is a term to describe a variant of Epiphonemonalism where, yes consciousness is a by-product, but it is also used as an input to future actions rather than consciousness now not affecting future consciousness?
Hi Jem!
What a great question. The answer is going to depend on what you think consciousness is. If, like the Epiphenomenalist, you think that consciousness is not a physical thing -- then you have two main options.
One, is dualism. This idea would be that there two types of stuff, physical stuff (like brains) and non-physical stuff (like minds). You could take the view that somehow the non-physical mind and the physical brain interact (this would be interactive dualism). I've linked to my substance dualism article below. But in short, the big problem the interactive dualist faces is how a non-physical thing interacts with the physical world. According to the laws of physics, to influence things (make changes in the world) is a property of being physical. Non-physical things, by definition, don't have these properties that physical things have.
Alternatively, you could take the view that the non-physical mind doesn't actually interact with the physical brain. They run in parallel. The brain does not influence the mind and the mind does not influence the brain. To me, this sort of idea must contend with similar objections that epiphenomenalism faces.
If you are leaning towards the idea that consciousness is non-physical there is another form of dualism that might fit with your thinking -- property dualism. This is the idea that while there is no extra substance beyond the physical brain. The brain is special. It has special properties that no other type of physical thing has. And these special properties are not physical things. So, the property of having a pain is a property of the brain. They are thought to be non-physical because they can't be reduced to the brain in the way that other physical things can (e.g. we can reduce water to H2O). People who believe in this view usually believe that we will need a completely new type of science if we have any hope in explaining consciousness. If you are leaning towards this view, you might find my article on What Exists and What is Imagined, an interesting read.
The second option (if you decide the mind is non-physical) is some form of idealism. This idea is that there is only one thing -- mind stuff -- physical things are entirely constructed by the mind. I haven't spent too much time discussing idealism. But I did write an article on one form of idealism -- solipsism, which is the idea that the only thing that exists is you.
If, on the other hand, you decide that the non-physical mind doesn't make much sense, then you will probably find your answer in some form of physicalism -- the idea that (somehow) consciousness can be fully explained by the physical world. If you decide to go down that path, there are many different versions of physicalism to explore (e.g. behaviourism, the mind-brain identity theory, functionalism, biological naturalism, panpsychism, quantum theory of consciousness, and many, many, scientific theories of consciousness).
Dualism:
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/substance-dualism-and-the-interaction-problem
What Exists and What is Imagined?:
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/what-exists-and-what-is-imagined
Solipsism:
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/solipsism
Suzi,
I can't thank you enough for taking the time to explain this in detail. Thank you so much for delving into the different theories. I feel inspired to go deeper on this. Interestingly, I can see positives in the notion behind all the theories you have expressed (even idealism).
The interesting subtlety with a physicalist explanation of consciousness is that we would also need to explain what the experience of a sense is too (I believe). Because why should the experience of even a simple sense be possible at all. This is almost a precursor to the bigger question of consciousness.
I'm going to make my way through all your articles now, and will no doubt how more questions or comments to add along the way (if you don't mind :))
Thanks again,
Jem
Yay! I'm glad you found it helpful. Absolutely, I'd love to read your comments and try to answer your questions.
Very interesting. I have a question maybe you can elaborate further. I am struggling to understand the difference between Epiphenomenalism as you explained it and a view in which the mind doesn't exist at all/is just an illusion. Are these two positions the same and if not how do Epiphenomenalists explain the existence of a non physical entity "consciousness"?
I wasn't so sure because most of the article sounded like these positions might be the same but then "Your wanting to have a cookie is just an afterthought, a narrative your brain spins up to explain your actions" sounded like the mind actually exists separate in Epiphenomenalism although just as a passive observer/commentator.
Great question! Both interpretations would have the same effect, right!? In the philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is often seen as a form of dualism — consciousness exists, it just has no effects. It might be seen as a way to avoid the interaction problem inherent in Descartes substance dualism.
But in everyday use, the term epiphenomenalism might be used to mean consciousness doesn’t exist. Although, in the philosophy that view is called eliminativism (or eliminative materialism).
Thank you for clarification. Makes sense - to me it also looks like its a kind of dualism where consciousness is just not very active avoiding the interaction problem.