“Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness—that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn’t affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness has always been that we can imagine a universe in which all the atoms are in the same place and people behave exactly the same way, but there’s nobody home—no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. The usual effect of the brain generating consciousness is missing, but consciousness doesn’t cause anything else in turn—it’s just a passive awareness—and so from the outside the universe looks the same. Now, I’m not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false—rather, I want to know if you think they’re impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules.”
Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness—that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn’t affect those neurons in turn?
A forest does not cause trees, and trees do not cause a forest; they are related, but their relation is of a different kind.
However, if you’re willing to abuse definitions a little bit, you can pretend that relation is causal; if you define a forest in terms of things like tree-density, then the forest is “caused by” trees, but it’s a causal dead-end which affects nothing in turn. The same holds for neurons and consciousness. However, it would be silly to talk about a bunch of trees in the same place which were not a forest, and similarly silly to talk about a working, talking brain without consciousness.
The debate isn’t about whether “consciousness is caused by neurons” is true but whether the specific arguments that Eliezer made in this thread forbid that “consciousness is caused by neurons” and “consciousness doesn’t affect neurons” can both be true.
I don’t see at all how the argument you are making here has something to do with the rule “For a statement to be comparable to your universe, so that it can be true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links.”
I assume the people arguing that “consciousness is caused by neurons” mean something similar to “the forest is caused by trees” and Eliezer is simply straw-manning/misinterpreting it.
Nope. Epiphenomenalism is motivated by the thought that you could (conceivably, in a world with different laws from ours) have the same bundles of neurons without any consciousness. You couldn’t conceivably have the same bundles of trees not be a forest.
My reply (before reading other replies) is that no, such theories are not forbidden. There is a causal link with the rest of the universe; neurons are causing consciousness. Consciousness, in turn, does not need to cause anything else to be part of the universe; it is part of the universe merely by being caused.
If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then what generated your question? I assume you are positing non-conscious people who ask all the same questions about consciousness that we do.
I don’t see a reason to rule out neuron-generated epiphenomena a priori—for example, the most elegant explanation of the phenomena might predict some entity that cannot be measured directly, and never affects anything measurable after its generation—but if they existed, we wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t ask questions about them. Therefore, whatever real thing it is you’re asking about cannot be an epiphenomenon.
If true consciousness is an epiphenomenon, then your question is not motivated by experiencing true consciousness. If your question is motivated by experiencing true consciousness, then true consciousness is not an epiphenomenon.
It started as a tiny set-piece speech about how consciousness couldn’t be an epiphenomenon, which is explicitly what the koan isn’t asking about. I had to rewrite several times before it seemed like the sort of thing that might actually engage the questioner.
I’m still not sure I actually answered the koan, though...
I think your answer is very much what the koan was meant to generate. Simply saying ‘No, I don’t a priori eliminate epiphenomenal theories’ seems like it’d miss the point entirely. You tackle the source of the concern or question, and conclude with a very good “If A, B, if ¬A, C” statement that easily follows from your arguments.
More importantly, your answer seems to completely reduce the problem and dissolve the question.
So if Universe A features epiphenomenal consciousness, and Universe B doesn’t, and that we consider the statement that we are in universe A and not universe B, then looking back at the rule:
“For a statement to be comparable to your universe, so that it can be true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links.”
These “causal links” you trace out are part of the map, not part of the territory—you have to be able to deduce their existence. And in this case (unlike the spaceship scenario), there is no way anybody can deduce the existence of the neuron → consciousness link, since by definition nothing can be observed about the consciousness.
You can account for a theory where neurons cause consciousness, and where consciousness has no further effects, by drawing a causal graph like
(universe)->(consciousness)
where each bracketed bit is short-hand for a possibly large number of nodes, and likewise the → is short for a possibly large number of arrows, and then you can certainly trace forward along causal links from “you” to “consciousness”, so it’s meaningful. And indeed for the same reason that “the ship doesn’t disappear when it crosses the horizon” is meaningful.
We reject epiphenomenal theories of consiousness because the causal model without the (consciousness) subgraph is more simpler than the one with it, and we have no evidence for the latter to overcome this prior improbability. This is of course the exact same reason why we accept that the ship still exists after it crosses the horizon.
[Cheating, since I already read some Zombie sequences, but have not read any replies in this thread]
The consciousness causes you to speak of consciousness, which is the result of neurons in your brain firing your jaw muscles (and other muscles, and so on). If it was epiphenomenal enough that none would talk about it, we wouldn’t have this question in the first place.
[Has consciousness] --> [Writes books/blogs on consciousness]
The rule does not rule out epiphenomenalism. It only rules out entities without causal connection in any direction with the material world, and epiphenomenalism says that there is a connection, albeit only in one direction.
Epiphenomena can be considered in terms of causal graphs. Suppose you have two causal graphs proposed to describe some phenomenon. In one, there is a variable called X, with many arrows in and out. The second graph is identical to the first, except that X is renamed to a new variable Y, then X is added back in with a causal arrow from Y to X, and no other arrows impinging on X. Y is stipulated to be unobservable and un-intervenable on, and X to be observable but un-intervenable on in both graphs.
Given these limitations on observations and interventions, is there any experiment that can distinguish between the two graphs? I think there is not.
If not, what does it mean to say that there is such a Y, and that it is Y, not X, that is producing the apparent causal effects of X? It’s almost as if at the meta-level, it is Y, not X, that is the epiphenomenon.
Drill down on “outside the universe,” as it seems to conflict with the definition of universe we’re using here. Presumably, we mean something which has access to the nodes in the connected fabric of causes and effects, but is not an input to any of them- much like the proposed consciousness. If consciousness is caused by neurons, it’s in the fabric, and our omniscient observer will be able to see whether or not consciousness is a node in the fabric or not. We’ll avoid the infinite regress by enforcing that all observers are inside the universe / the connected causal fabric, but they are differentiated by where they are in the fabric.
From inside the fabric, we can only comment confidently on the nodes we have access to, and implicitly the nodes which are ancestors of those nodes. Agents like us are both causal ancestors and descendents of each other- we see clear feedback loops that convince everyone of the reality of other agents (barring those confused by solipsism, of course). There could be silent observers (of the consciousness variety or otherwise) that are descendents but not ancestors of the nodes we have access to- and because they’re not ancestors of the nodes we have access to, we can’t comment confidently on them! But by Occam’s Razor, it’s generally better to not put such nodes into your model of the universe, since they don’t give you any additional predictive or manipulative power, but still cost cognitive resources to lug around.
(It seems to me that a principle that only relies only on the structure of the causal graph which excludes silent observers will also exclude the spaceship that has passed the horizon- and so either we need a principle from outside the model, like “my intuition says spaceships don’t disappear but silent observers aren’t real,” or to put them in the same bin.)
The only problem with epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness is that the thing we call consciousness does have an effect on our actions (proof: answer the question “how do you know you’re conscious?” out loud), so the thing they call “consciousness” must be something different. However, these rules don’t say that this thing is impossible or meaningless; by definition, it’s caused by neurons, and so (if it actually happens) would be causally linked to reality, and hence meet the criteria for being “real”.
Consciousness in reality causes us to emit sentences about an awareness of subjective experience, so there is a coupling between neurons and the conscious algorithm being run by those neurons.
If consciousness were merely a passive awareness with no causal influence upon anything else in reality, it would not be causally entangled with the universe. This is as close to “meaningless” as I can imagine.
A one way causal connection cannot be observed. If neurons cause consciousness, but consciousness does absolutely not affect anything else, then there is literally no way to observe consciousness, and so you must in addition to the description of the causal universe include the fact that there are things that are affected by the universe’s existence but does not affect the universe, and furthermore that consciousness is one such thing.
A strictly simpler theory is that there is a causal universe, without all that epiphenomea cruft.
Also, the viewpoint of epiphenomenal consciousness is very much triggering my pattern maching of ‘human specific inbuilt stupidity’.
On a side note,remember that there are no fundamental photons nor light cones. There is only whatever QFT is the true one; the rest are mathematical consequences.
As I read it, the rule does not forbid epiphenomena. Epiphenomena are caused by ordinary things that we can observe, so they are connected to us by causal links, even though we can never discover these links, since epiphenomena do not themselves cause anything we can observe.
This seems like a coherent way the universe could be, but isn’t. The machine simulating the universe could constantly scan it for blue objects and populate a list of all blue objects—but without using that list for anything further. This would be an epiphenomal blue-ness tag.
“We can imagine any number of universes, that does not always lead to a good argument. In this case, the main issue with the argument is that while we can imagine that universe, it doesn’t look like ours. There’s no talk of consciousness, there’s no self-reflection. Those are things in reality clearly caused by a link between our thoughts and our brains, one that goes in both directions.
Imagining a world in which people act exactly like people do now, but without a consciousness, strays so clearly outside the bounds of Occam’s Razor that there doesn’t seem to be any point in thinking about it. Adding in a mysterious ‘zombie master’ to make the zombies act as though they had consciousness… Well at this point, we’re not talking about anything remotely resembling reality. This entire thought experiment in no way gives us any truths about reality whatsoever. It is completely meaningless.”
It does not. Epiphenomenal consciousness could be real for the same reason that the spaceship vanishing over the event horizon. It’s Occam’s Razor that knocks down that one.
As with the psychic cousin, this particular rule doesn’t seem to forbid it outright (at least not in the obvious way). But a node thrown in with only one link to the rest of the universe still seems suspicious. It smells of an ad hoc hypothesis even before we ask if it means “consciousness” in the usual sense.
“For a statement to be comparable to your universe, so that it can be true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links.”
With the above solution, then yes epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness are meaningful. They clearly describe networks in which consciousness connected to the rest of reality that you experience. On the other hand, I think that this is because the above statement fails at its intended goal rather than that these theories are actually meaningful. In particular I think one should append to the above:
“Furthermore, it must not be possible to remove this stuff (and perhaps some other stuff) from your causal network without affecting things that you can experience.”
For any precise definition of consciousness that fits epiphenomenalism, it would be meaningful. However, to my knowledge, no such precise definition has been put forward.
It doesn’t rule it out. Unless you’re directly observing those epiphenominal nodes, Occam’s razor heavily decreases the likelihood of such models though, because they make the same predictions with more nodes.
The theory does not forbid a node from having no causal effect on anything else, which is what I think an epiphenomenal consciousness would be. But such a node could not be measured. A logical positivist would say this makes the theory meaningless, and I’m inclined to agree.
Conceivably, if the universe runs on a computer, there could be a node which cannot be measured from inside the universe but could be measured from outside. Perhaps debug info is turned on, and any time neurons fire in patterns that match some regex, the word “consciousness” is printed to stderr. I would not say this is meaningless; if it is true, it gives us a way of communicating with whoever is watching stderr (but no guarantee that such a being exists or would talk back).
But it is not suitable as a theory of consciousness, unless you want to stipulate that neurons write about consciousness for reasons that are completely uncorrelated to consciousness.
Draw a Venn Diagram, with “things that are causes” and “things that are effects” (get-caused-by-other things). The intersection in the middle is “reality”
Consciousness, in this model, is “effect, but not cause”—it doesn’t change any of our anticipations about the rest of the universe, and is therefor meaningless (but not intrinsically impossible)
Psionics, in this model, is being asserted as “cause, without effect”—either it actually is effected by the state of reality, and thus correlates with reality (in which case it is part of “reality”), or else it is not correlated to reality and thus cannot produce useful information on the state of said reality.
Note that “cause, without effect” does include the possibility of “a particle and anti-particle spontaneously enter the universe AND have a measurable effect on said universe before vanishing”. I can’t think of any reason to conclude that this is impossible, and it would certainly be meaningful. The point still stands that such events would by necessity be random processes, not ones that correlate with the world—you can’t gain actual information on what card someone drew this way.
Well, my first thought was that it doesn’t rule epiphenomenal consciousness out. It’s strange that people would still talk about consciousness without it, but you can posit that people are just programmed to talk about consciousness for some reason (it’s at least conceivable).
Then I looked at the next guy’s answer (asparisi) and thought he had a point: Does our theory of causal links allow for causes to have probabilistic effects? (It’s different to say that ‘human brains sometimes cause consciousness than to say ‘human brains can cause ANYTHING, like a blue goblin appearing in front of you or the universe being destroyed and replaced with another one’) I’m not sure. If it does, then epiphenomena-that-sometimes-don’t-happen are okay. If not, they aren’t.
THEN I thought, but if consciousness is an epiphenomenon then what’s strange is that people talk about it at all—by definition, we cannot be aware of an epiphenomenon. But there could be another cause for the discussion of something we can’t interact with in any way. After all, people’s talk about gods is not caused by gods. There are other reasons to rule epiphenomena out, but a world with P-zombies is at least conceivable, even if it requires a lot of unlikely assumptions.
I’m not sure. And am not sure how you would you do an experiment to check. My rules aren’t data typed into a computer program on which the universe runs, they’re descriptions of the universe as experienced through my senses and processed through my mind be things like “inference” and colored by things like the “expectation of beauty”, and “Occam’s Razor.”
The reason I don’t believe in the epiphenomenal theory of consciousness is because of the evidence against it, starting with my awareness, the existence of all this talk about awareness, and ending with fuzzier sort of thinking like, “Animals seem awake and aware and aware that they’re aware.”
Oh, that and saying that consciousness doesn’t cause anything you can sense seem a violation of Occam’s Razor, while consciousness not effecting anything, ever, even in principle, seems to be a rejection of causality itself.
“Consciousness” is a label for the cause of people talking about consciousness. The epiphenomenal consciousness model replaces that with nothing. It’s a meaningful arrangement of the causal net. It seems just rather unlikely, given that most people talk about consciousness—there’s probably something behind it.
Hm. Well, it does prevent the thought experiment, at minimum.
If we take the rule as true, then it is incoherent to talk about a universe where the neurons in your brain are doing all the same stuff but don’t give rise to consciousness. We can talk about a different structure that might be composed of neurons, but not the same structure. Whether you believe in epiphenomena or not, we take consciousness to be caused by neurons in our universe. So another universe with the same neuronal structure that followed this rule would make the thought experiment fail.
So if I have the right sort of structure of neurons and this rule, then I have consciousness. The ‘epiphenomena’ stops doing any work: the universe looks the same whether or not I posit the epiphenomena. So the epiphenomena isn’t explaining consciousness anymore. So while the rule doesn’t forbid epiphenomenal theories of consciousness per se, it does mean that if those epiphenomena are supposed to not be a causal result of the neurons in any conceivable universe, then they can’t be a causal result of the neurons in this universe.
Koan 2:
“Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness—that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn’t affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness has always been that we can imagine a universe in which all the atoms are in the same place and people behave exactly the same way, but there’s nobody home—no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. The usual effect of the brain generating consciousness is missing, but consciousness doesn’t cause anything else in turn—it’s just a passive awareness—and so from the outside the universe looks the same. Now, I’m not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false—rather, I want to know if you think they’re impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules.”
How would you reply?
A forest does not cause trees, and trees do not cause a forest; they are related, but their relation is of a different kind.
However, if you’re willing to abuse definitions a little bit, you can pretend that relation is causal; if you define a forest in terms of things like tree-density, then the forest is “caused by” trees, but it’s a causal dead-end which affects nothing in turn. The same holds for neurons and consciousness. However, it would be silly to talk about a bunch of trees in the same place which were not a forest, and similarly silly to talk about a working, talking brain without consciousness.
The debate isn’t about whether “consciousness is caused by neurons” is true but whether the specific arguments that Eliezer made in this thread forbid that “consciousness is caused by neurons” and “consciousness doesn’t affect neurons” can both be true.
I don’t see at all how the argument you are making here has something to do with the rule “For a statement to be comparable to your universe, so that it can be true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links.”
I assume the people arguing that “consciousness is caused by neurons” mean something similar to “the forest is caused by trees” and Eliezer is simply straw-manning/misinterpreting it.
Nope. Epiphenomenalism is motivated by the thought that you could (conceivably, in a world with different laws from ours) have the same bundles of neurons without any consciousness. You couldn’t conceivably have the same bundles of trees not be a forest.
Good point, thanks.
My reply (before reading other replies) is that no, such theories are not forbidden. There is a causal link with the rest of the universe; neurons are causing consciousness. Consciousness, in turn, does not need to cause anything else to be part of the universe; it is part of the universe merely by being caused.
If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then what generated your question? I assume you are positing non-conscious people who ask all the same questions about consciousness that we do.
I don’t see a reason to rule out neuron-generated epiphenomena a priori—for example, the most elegant explanation of the phenomena might predict some entity that cannot be measured directly, and never affects anything measurable after its generation—but if they existed, we wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t ask questions about them. Therefore, whatever real thing it is you’re asking about cannot be an epiphenomenon.
If true consciousness is an epiphenomenon, then your question is not motivated by experiencing true consciousness. If your question is motivated by experiencing true consciousness, then true consciousness is not an epiphenomenon.
I like your koan responses. They seem like the sort of thinking and arguments that could actually be useful in a discussion, too.
Thanks.
It started as a tiny set-piece speech about how consciousness couldn’t be an epiphenomenon, which is explicitly what the koan isn’t asking about. I had to rewrite several times before it seemed like the sort of thing that might actually engage the questioner.
I’m still not sure I actually answered the koan, though...
I think your answer is very much what the koan was meant to generate. Simply saying ‘No, I don’t a priori eliminate epiphenomenal theories’ seems like it’d miss the point entirely. You tackle the source of the concern or question, and conclude with a very good “If A, B, if ¬A, C” statement that easily follows from your arguments.
More importantly, your answer seems to completely reduce the problem and dissolve the question.
So if Universe A features epiphenomenal consciousness, and Universe B doesn’t, and that we consider the statement that we are in universe A and not universe B, then looking back at the rule:
These “causal links” you trace out are part of the map, not part of the territory—you have to be able to deduce their existence. And in this case (unlike the spaceship scenario), there is no way anybody can deduce the existence of the neuron → consciousness link, since by definition nothing can be observed about the consciousness.
=> so, firmly in the “meaningless” camp.
You can account for a theory where neurons cause consciousness, and where consciousness has no further effects, by drawing a causal graph like
(universe)->(consciousness)
where each bracketed bit is short-hand for a possibly large number of nodes, and likewise the → is short for a possibly large number of arrows, and then you can certainly trace forward along causal links from “you” to “consciousness”, so it’s meaningful. And indeed for the same reason that “the ship doesn’t disappear when it crosses the horizon” is meaningful.
We reject epiphenomenal theories of consiousness because the causal model without the (consciousness) subgraph is more simpler than the one with it, and we have no evidence for the latter to overcome this prior improbability. This is of course the exact same reason why we accept that the ship still exists after it crosses the horizon.
[Cheating, since I already read some Zombie sequences, but have not read any replies in this thread] The consciousness causes you to speak of consciousness, which is the result of neurons in your brain firing your jaw muscles (and other muscles, and so on). If it was epiphenomenal enough that none would talk about it, we wouldn’t have this question in the first place.
[Has consciousness] --> [Writes books/blogs on consciousness]
Causually connects consciousness to the universe.
The rule does not rule out epiphenomenalism. It only rules out entities without causal connection in any direction with the material world, and epiphenomenalism says that there is a connection, albeit only in one direction.
Epiphenomenalism is ruled out for other reasons.
Epiphenomena can be considered in terms of causal graphs. Suppose you have two causal graphs proposed to describe some phenomenon. In one, there is a variable called X, with many arrows in and out. The second graph is identical to the first, except that X is renamed to a new variable Y, then X is added back in with a causal arrow from Y to X, and no other arrows impinging on X. Y is stipulated to be unobservable and un-intervenable on, and X to be observable but un-intervenable on in both graphs.
Given these limitations on observations and interventions, is there any experiment that can distinguish between the two graphs? I think there is not.
If not, what does it mean to say that there is such a Y, and that it is Y, not X, that is producing the apparent causal effects of X? It’s almost as if at the meta-level, it is Y, not X, that is the epiphenomenon.
Drill down on “outside the universe,” as it seems to conflict with the definition of universe we’re using here. Presumably, we mean something which has access to the nodes in the connected fabric of causes and effects, but is not an input to any of them- much like the proposed consciousness. If consciousness is caused by neurons, it’s in the fabric, and our omniscient observer will be able to see whether or not consciousness is a node in the fabric or not. We’ll avoid the infinite regress by enforcing that all observers are inside the universe / the connected causal fabric, but they are differentiated by where they are in the fabric.
From inside the fabric, we can only comment confidently on the nodes we have access to, and implicitly the nodes which are ancestors of those nodes. Agents like us are both causal ancestors and descendents of each other- we see clear feedback loops that convince everyone of the reality of other agents (barring those confused by solipsism, of course). There could be silent observers (of the consciousness variety or otherwise) that are descendents but not ancestors of the nodes we have access to- and because they’re not ancestors of the nodes we have access to, we can’t comment confidently on them! But by Occam’s Razor, it’s generally better to not put such nodes into your model of the universe, since they don’t give you any additional predictive or manipulative power, but still cost cognitive resources to lug around.
(It seems to me that a principle that only relies only on the structure of the causal graph which excludes silent observers will also exclude the spaceship that has passed the horizon- and so either we need a principle from outside the model, like “my intuition says spaceships don’t disappear but silent observers aren’t real,” or to put them in the same bin.)
The only problem with epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness is that the thing we call consciousness does have an effect on our actions (proof: answer the question “how do you know you’re conscious?” out loud), so the thing they call “consciousness” must be something different. However, these rules don’t say that this thing is impossible or meaningless; by definition, it’s caused by neurons, and so (if it actually happens) would be causally linked to reality, and hence meet the criteria for being “real”.
Impossible, no; meaningless, yes.
Consciousness in reality causes us to emit sentences about an awareness of subjective experience, so there is a coupling between neurons and the conscious algorithm being run by those neurons.
If consciousness were merely a passive awareness with no causal influence upon anything else in reality, it would not be causally entangled with the universe. This is as close to “meaningless” as I can imagine.
A one way causal connection cannot be observed. If neurons cause consciousness, but consciousness does absolutely not affect anything else, then there is literally no way to observe consciousness, and so you must in addition to the description of the causal universe include the fact that there are things that are affected by the universe’s existence but does not affect the universe, and furthermore that consciousness is one such thing.
A strictly simpler theory is that there is a causal universe, without all that epiphenomea cruft.
Also, the viewpoint of epiphenomenal consciousness is very much triggering my pattern maching of ‘human specific inbuilt stupidity’.
How’s this different from the case photon leaving my future light cone?
it is different because the mathematical model of the universe makes a mention of the photon, but not of the consciousness.
In a theoretical future version of python, the photon example would be:
While the conssciousness example would be:
On a side note,remember that there are no fundamental photons nor light cones. There is only whatever QFT is the true one; the rest are mathematical consequences.
As I read it, the rule does not forbid epiphenomena. Epiphenomena are caused by ordinary things that we can observe, so they are connected to us by causal links, even though we can never discover these links, since epiphenomena do not themselves cause anything we can observe.
This seems like a coherent way the universe could be, but isn’t. The machine simulating the universe could constantly scan it for blue objects and populate a list of all blue objects—but without using that list for anything further. This would be an epiphenomal blue-ness tag.
I would say that it isn’t ruled out a prior because a causal chain does run from the observable (the neurons) to consciousness.
“We can imagine any number of universes, that does not always lead to a good argument. In this case, the main issue with the argument is that while we can imagine that universe, it doesn’t look like ours. There’s no talk of consciousness, there’s no self-reflection. Those are things in reality clearly caused by a link between our thoughts and our brains, one that goes in both directions.
Imagining a world in which people act exactly like people do now, but without a consciousness, strays so clearly outside the bounds of Occam’s Razor that there doesn’t seem to be any point in thinking about it. Adding in a mysterious ‘zombie master’ to make the zombies act as though they had consciousness… Well at this point, we’re not talking about anything remotely resembling reality. This entire thought experiment in no way gives us any truths about reality whatsoever. It is completely meaningless.”
It does not. Epiphenomenal consciousness could be real for the same reason that the spaceship vanishing over the event horizon. It’s Occam’s Razor that knocks down that one.
A strict reading of the rule suggests that it doesn’t; consciousness is caused by neurons, and we observe neurons.
As with the psychic cousin, this particular rule doesn’t seem to forbid it outright (at least not in the obvious way). But a node thrown in with only one link to the rest of the universe still seems suspicious. It smells of an ad hoc hypothesis even before we ask if it means “consciousness” in the usual sense.
(For this one I only saw Emile’s comment.)
With the above solution, then yes epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness are meaningful. They clearly describe networks in which consciousness connected to the rest of reality that you experience. On the other hand, I think that this is because the above statement fails at its intended goal rather than that these theories are actually meaningful. In particular I think one should append to the above:
“Furthermore, it must not be possible to remove this stuff (and perhaps some other stuff) from your causal network without affecting things that you can experience.”
For any precise definition of consciousness that fits epiphenomenalism, it would be meaningful. However, to my knowledge, no such precise definition has been put forward.
It doesn’t rule it out. Unless you’re directly observing those epiphenominal nodes, Occam’s razor heavily decreases the likelihood of such models though, because they make the same predictions with more nodes.
(Written without reading other comments.)
The theory does not forbid a node from having no causal effect on anything else, which is what I think an epiphenomenal consciousness would be. But such a node could not be measured. A logical positivist would say this makes the theory meaningless, and I’m inclined to agree.
Conceivably, if the universe runs on a computer, there could be a node which cannot be measured from inside the universe but could be measured from outside. Perhaps debug info is turned on, and any time neurons fire in patterns that match some regex, the word “consciousness” is printed to stderr. I would not say this is meaningless; if it is true, it gives us a way of communicating with whoever is watching stderr (but no guarantee that such a being exists or would talk back).
But it is not suitable as a theory of consciousness, unless you want to stipulate that neurons write about consciousness for reasons that are completely uncorrelated to consciousness.
Draw a Venn Diagram, with “things that are causes” and “things that are effects” (get-caused-by-other things). The intersection in the middle is “reality”
Consciousness, in this model, is “effect, but not cause”—it doesn’t change any of our anticipations about the rest of the universe, and is therefor meaningless (but not intrinsically impossible)
Psionics, in this model, is being asserted as “cause, without effect”—either it actually is effected by the state of reality, and thus correlates with reality (in which case it is part of “reality”), or else it is not correlated to reality and thus cannot produce useful information on the state of said reality.
Note that “cause, without effect” does include the possibility of “a particle and anti-particle spontaneously enter the universe AND have a measurable effect on said universe before vanishing”. I can’t think of any reason to conclude that this is impossible, and it would certainly be meaningful. The point still stands that such events would by necessity be random processes, not ones that correlate with the world—you can’t gain actual information on what card someone drew this way.
Well, my first thought was that it doesn’t rule epiphenomenal consciousness out. It’s strange that people would still talk about consciousness without it, but you can posit that people are just programmed to talk about consciousness for some reason (it’s at least conceivable).
Then I looked at the next guy’s answer (asparisi) and thought he had a point: Does our theory of causal links allow for causes to have probabilistic effects? (It’s different to say that ‘human brains sometimes cause consciousness than to say ‘human brains can cause ANYTHING, like a blue goblin appearing in front of you or the universe being destroyed and replaced with another one’) I’m not sure. If it does, then epiphenomena-that-sometimes-don’t-happen are okay. If not, they aren’t.
THEN I thought, but if consciousness is an epiphenomenon then what’s strange is that people talk about it at all—by definition, we cannot be aware of an epiphenomenon. But there could be another cause for the discussion of something we can’t interact with in any way. After all, people’s talk about gods is not caused by gods. There are other reasons to rule epiphenomena out, but a world with P-zombies is at least conceivable, even if it requires a lot of unlikely assumptions.
I’m not sure. And am not sure how you would you do an experiment to check. My rules aren’t data typed into a computer program on which the universe runs, they’re descriptions of the universe as experienced through my senses and processed through my mind be things like “inference” and colored by things like the “expectation of beauty”, and “Occam’s Razor.”
The reason I don’t believe in the epiphenomenal theory of consciousness is because of the evidence against it, starting with my awareness, the existence of all this talk about awareness, and ending with fuzzier sort of thinking like, “Animals seem awake and aware and aware that they’re aware.”
Oh, that and saying that consciousness doesn’t cause anything you can sense seem a violation of Occam’s Razor, while consciousness not effecting anything, ever, even in principle, seems to be a rejection of causality itself.
It seems like a meaningful statement.
“Consciousness” is a label for the cause of people talking about consciousness. The epiphenomenal consciousness model replaces that with nothing. It’s a meaningful arrangement of the causal net. It seems just rather unlikely, given that most people talk about consciousness—there’s probably something behind it.
Hm. Well, it does prevent the thought experiment, at minimum.
If we take the rule as true, then it is incoherent to talk about a universe where the neurons in your brain are doing all the same stuff but don’t give rise to consciousness. We can talk about a different structure that might be composed of neurons, but not the same structure. Whether you believe in epiphenomena or not, we take consciousness to be caused by neurons in our universe. So another universe with the same neuronal structure that followed this rule would make the thought experiment fail.
So if I have the right sort of structure of neurons and this rule, then I have consciousness. The ‘epiphenomena’ stops doing any work: the universe looks the same whether or not I posit the epiphenomena. So the epiphenomena isn’t explaining consciousness anymore. So while the rule doesn’t forbid epiphenomenal theories of consciousness per se, it does mean that if those epiphenomena are supposed to not be a causal result of the neurons in any conceivable universe, then they can’t be a causal result of the neurons in this universe.