Epiphenomenalism
From Exampleproblems
Epiphenomenalism is the view in philosophy of mind according to which physical events have mental effects, but mental events have no effects of any kind. In other words, the causal relations go only one way, from physical to mental. In recent times it is usually considered a type of dualism, because it postulates physical events but also non-physical mental events; but historically is has sometimes been thought a kind of monism, because of its sharp divergence from substance dualism.
Put simply, if Pierre eats a candy bar and experiences pleasure, that experience is caused by his eating the candy bar. On the other hand, if he goes to get another candy bar, it is not his experience that is causing him to do this. Mental events, like Pierre's pleasurable experience, are just epiphenomena – side-effects, or by-products – of physical processes in the nervous system.
A powerful critique of epiphenomenalism would hold that Pierre's later verbal expression of satisfaction from eating the candy bar is not a matter of knowledge since the verbal expression is not caused directly by the satisfaction. More importantly, in an epiphenomenal world devoid of mental causality, the very case for epiphenomenalism itself is prohibited from being a matter of knowledge. There is no direct causal link between the mental events of the epiphenomenalist and her theory of epiphenomenalism. Put another way, all arguments for and against epiphenomenalism could logically exist independent of any mental activity at all.
Transcript:
BBC Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg’s In our Time; The Mind Body Problem About 33 mins in… Melvyn Bragg, chair, and Julian Baggini, editor of Philosophers’ Magazine are talking...
Melvyn Bragg: Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s Bulldog, took Dawin’s notion’s on, and seemed to make an emphatic entry into this (Cartesian) Mind /Body dispute. Can you tell us about that and Epiphenomenalism, if you can unwrap that?
Julian Baggini: Epiphenomenalism is very interesting, and Huxley -- there aren’t many people who claim to be followers of Huxley. He’s not one of the people undergraduates first go to, but in a sense, his ghost seems to straddle the whole contemporary debate about this.
What Huxley was doing was taking on board three facts that seem to now be undeniable, and go to what was at the time the most logical, but in an other way counter-intuitive conclusion. The facts being we are entirely biological organisms; the physical world has what we call causal closure, which means that any effect in the physical world is caused by something else in the physical world, and nothing else; and the organ of thought is the brain, a physical object. Now if you put all those things together, what that seems to imply is that whatever goes on in our minds is just somehow the product of a purely physical process going on in the brain. So if you like he’s seeing humans as a kind of biological machine and the inner life that we have is just the hum of that machine. The hum of a machine doesn’t move the machine, it’s just a byproduct of it, an Epiphenomenon.
Huxley’s view was that that’s what thoughts are; we have a pain and we go ‘Ow’ and we think intuitively that the feeling of pain is what’s making us pull away, or making us go and do something about it, but the Epiphenomenal view is that that’s not true-all the causes are at the physical level, the way it feels just sits on top. That’s such a dispiriting and distressing conclusion that a lot of people would say it the duty of any decent theory of mind to show that Epiphenomenalism is false -- Jerry Fodor, a well known contemporary philosopher, once said if Epiphenomenalism is true then that’s the end of the world, meaning the world isn’t how we think of it at all. Epiphenomenalism is seen as the terrible thing we have to avoid, and if you can show that your opponent's view leads to epiphenomenalism then some people would take that to mean that it is inadequate, but what I think is interesting is if Epiphenomenalism should be taken more seriously
