Epiphenomenalism is a view in philosophy of mind according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of physical states of the world. Thus, epiphenomenalism denies that the mind has any causal influence on the body or any other part of the physical world: while mental states are caused by physical states, mental states do not have any causal influence on physical states. Some versions of epiphenomenalism claim that all mental states are causally inert, while some versions claim that only some mental states are causally inert. The latter version often claims that only particular types of mental states that are especially difficult to account for in the sciences are epiphenomenal, such as qualitative mental states (e.g., the sensation of pain). A Phrenological mapping of the brain. ...

Background

One of the earliest views resembling epiphenomenalism was discussed by Thomas Huxley. Huxley (1874) likened mental phenomena to the whistle on a steam locomotive. However, epiphenomenalism flourished primarily as it found a niche among methodological or scientific behaviorism. In the early 1900s scientific behaviorists such as Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner began the attempt to uncover laws describing the relationship between stimuli and responses, without reference to inner mental phenomena. Instead of adopting a form of eliminativism or mental fictionalism, positions that deny that inner mental phenomena exists, a behaviorist was able to adopt epiphenomenalism in order to allow for the existence of mind. However, by the 1960s, scientific behaviourism met substantial difficulties and eventually gave way to the cognitive revolution. Participants in that revolution, such as Jerry Fodor, reject epiphenomenalism and insist upon the causal efficacy of the mind. Fodor even speaks of "epiphobia"—fear that one is becoming an epiphenomenalist. Thomas Henry Huxley, FRS (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist, known as Darwins Bulldog for his defence of Charles Darwins theory of evolution. ... Behaviorism or behaviourism is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states. ... Ivan Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Russian: ) (September 14, 1849 – February 27, 1936) was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician. ... John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878–September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism, after doing research on animal behavior. ... Burrhus Frederic Skinner Burrhus Frederic B. F. Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist and author. ... Eliminativists argue that our modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to our ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model of the universe. ... Fictionalism is a doctrine in philosophy that suggests that statements of a certain sort should not be taken to be literally true, but merely a useful fiction. ... The cognitive revolution is a name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that combined new thinking in psychology, anthropology and linguistics with the nascent fields of computer science and neuroscience. ... Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is a philosopher at Rutgers University, New Jersey. ...

However, since the cognitive revolution, there have been several who have argued for a version of epiphenomenalism. These more recent versions, however, maintain that only the subjective, qualitative aspects of mental states are epiphenomenal. Imagine both Pierre and a robot eating a cupcake. Unlike the robot, Pierre is conscious of eating the cupcake while the behavior is under way. This subjective experience is often called a quale (plural qualia), and it describes the private "raw feel" or the subjective "what-it-is-like" that is the inner accompaniment of many mental states. Thus, while Pierre and the robot are both be doing the same thing, only Pierre has the inner conscious experience. Redness is the canonical quale. ... Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Serbia) is University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and member of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. ...

Frank Jackson (1982), for example, once espoused the following view:

I am what is sometimes known as a "qualia freak". I think that there are certain features of bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain... you won't have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy....[1]

According to epiphenomenalism, mental states like Pierre's pleasurable experience—or, at any rate, their distinctive qualia—are just epiphenomena; they are side-effects or by-products of physical processes in the body. Pierre, according to epiphenomenalism, might as well be a robot or a zombie, because conscious mental states do not affect his behavior. If Pierre takes a second bite, it is not caused by his pleasure from the first; If Pierre says, "That was good, so I will take another bite", his speech act is not caused by the preceding pleasure. The conscious experiences that accompany brain processes are causally impotent. Image File history File links Cquote1. ... Image File history File links Cquote2. ... An epiphenomenon is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside a primary phenomenon. ... In philosophy, a philosophical zombie or p-zombie is a hypothetical person that, despite a strong likeness to normal human beings, lacks conscious experience or (in other words) has no qualia at all. ...

Some critical responses

The philosophical behaviorists (as opposed to scientific behaviourists) reject epiphenomenalism on the grounds that it is, in Gilbert Ryle's phrase, a "category mistake." Just as there is no Cartesian "ghost in the machine", there are no ghostly events that accompany behavior in an inner theater. Consciousness belongs not to the category of objects of reference, but rather to the category of ways of doing things. To be attentive is to do things with focus and care, not for something to be happening in the ghostly theater that Ryle lampooned as a dualist dogma. Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), was a philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgensteins insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase the ghost in the machine. He referred to some... A category mistake is a semantic or ontological error by which a property (or some category of being) is incorrectly ascribed to a particular ontological type or token in a proposition and therefore is meaningless or nonsense. ...

Functionalists chart a different course, accepting that there is a system of mental events mediating stimulus and response, but asserting that this system is "topic neutral" and capable of being realized in various ways. The topic neutrality of the mind implies the denial of epiphenomenalism, which, as a kind of property dualism, fixes consciousness as a non-neutral, non-physical topic. Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. ... Multiple realisability is an idea in philosophy of mind, which serves as a criticism to the identity theory. ...

Eliminative materialists, on the other hand, assert that the concept of mind aims to fix reference to a non-physical topic; so they disagree with the philosophical behaviorist analysis, as well as the functionalist analysis. Eliminative materialism holds, however, that this dualistic aim of "folk psychology" is a fatal error built into mental concepts. So it would be better to eliminate the concept of mind, and concepts implicated in it such as desire and belief, in favor of an emerging neurocomputational account. (A more moderate eliminativist position would maintain what J. L. Mackie called an error theory, stripping false beliefs away from the problematic concepts but not eliminating them, leaving intact a legitimate core of meaning.) Eliminativists argue that our modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to our ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model of the universe. ... Folk psychology (sometimes called naïve psychology) is the psychological theory implicit in our everyday ascriptions of others actions, and includes concepts such as belief (he thinks that Peter is wise), desire (she wants that piece of cake), fear (Alex is afraid of spiders) and hope (she hopes that he... John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981) was a philosopher, originally from Sydney, Australia. ...

Arguments for

A large body of neurophysiological data seems to support epiphenomenalism. Some of the oldest such data is the Bereitschaftspotential or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of taking a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet et al (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. Recent research on the Event Related Potential also shows that conscious experience does not occur until the late phase of the potential (P3 or later) that occurs 300 milliseconds or more after the event. In Bregman's Auditory Continuity Illusion, where a pure tone is followed by broadband noise and the noise is followed by the same pure tone it seems as if the tone occurs throughout the period of noise. This also suggests a delay for processing data before conscious experience occurs. Norretranders has called the delay "The User Illusion" implying that we only have the illusion of conscious control, most actions being controlled automatically by non-conscious parts of the brain with the conscious mind relegated to the role of spectator. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The illusory continuity of tones is the auditory illusion caused when a tone is interrupted for a short time (approximately 50ms or less), during which a narrow band of noise is played. ... The term user illusion originated at Xerox PARC to describe the illusion created for the user by a human-computer interface, for example the visual metaphor of a desktop used in many Graphical user interfaces. ...

The scientific data seem to support the idea that conscious experience is created by non-conscious processes in the brain (i.e., there is subliminal processing that becomes conscious experience). These results have been interpreted to suggest that people are capable of action before conscious experience of the decision to act occurs. Some argue that this supports epiphenomenalism, since it shows that the feeling of making a decision to act is actually an epiphenomenon; the action happens before the decision, so the decision did not cause the action to occur. For the article about subconscious level message delivery, see subliminal message. ...

Arguments against

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. 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.

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": For other people named William James see William James (disambiguation) William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. ...

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]

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? 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. Image File history File links Cquote1. ... Image File history File links Cquote2. ...

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. It has been suggested that Combative dualism be merged into this article or section. ...

Notes

References and further reading

• Chalmers, David. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dennet, Daniel. (2003) Freedom evolves.
• Huxley, Thomas. (1874) "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History", The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 16, pp. 555-580. Reprinted in Method and Results: Essays by Thomas H. Huxley (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898).
• Jackson, Frank. (1982) "Epiphenomenal Qualia", The Philosophical Quarterly, 32, pp. 127-136. Online text
• James, William. (1890) The Principles of Psychology, Henry Holt And Company. Online text
• Libet, Benjamin, E. W. Wright, B. Feinstein, and D. K. Pearl, "Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience", Brain, 194, pp. 191-221.
• Libet, Benjamin. (1985) "Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, pp. 529-566.
• Robinson, William. (2003) "Epiphenomenalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Zalta (ed.). Online text

See also

• Philosophy of mind
• Dualism (philosophy of mind)
• Qualia
• Frank Jackson

A Phrenological mapping of the brain. ... In the philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. ... Redness is the canonical quale. ... Frank Cameron Jackson (born 1943) is a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. ...

External links

• "Epiphenomenalism" - an article by William Robinson in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Wikibook on consciousness
• Exit Epiphenomenalism - Analysis by Rivas and Van Dongen.
• Strange Ideas