An important consequence of epiphenomenalism is that while the conscience is real, the assessment of conscience in other beings is impossible for Science.
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.
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
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.
"...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!
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).
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.
These are great explanations, but when will we find out what SUZI thinks about all of these controversial ideas??
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.
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
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.
"...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!
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).