“Under physicalist epiphenomenalism (which is the standard approach to the mind-matter relation)” ← can you give support for this parenthetical claim? It has been some years since I took a philosophy of mind course, but when I did, I got the impression that epiphenomenalism is not the most popular view on the mind-body problem.
What are the alternatives? As long as you accept the autonomy of matter (this is physicalism) there are not degrees of freedom left.
I dont know what is the current majority, but physicalism is clearly majority for scientists, and once you are a physicalist either you are epiphenomenalist or eliminativist. Probably there is a majority of self reported eliminativists, but I take the charitable position of thinking that they don’t really understand the issue.
There are forms of physicalism that are not eliminativist (they see consciousness as something real, for example as a kind of information processing) and are not epiphenomenalist (they hold that mental states can affect the physical world). I hold a view like this, and I would guess most non-dualist philosophers of mind do too.
Personally I think that eliminativism (at least in its most extreme forms) and epiphenomenalism are both intuitively implausible. They contradict my firsthand experience that my consciousness exists and has effects on the observable physical world. So I’m unlikely to accept either of them without a strong argument.
the fact that mind is determined by a physical system not necessarily entail epiphenomenalism. My best analogy is the difference between the object language and the metalanguage. In mathematics (number theory, Godel’s theorem), the metalanguage is embedded in the object language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage#Embedded In this sense, the metalanguage supervenes on (and is determined by) the object language, but is not an epiphenomenon (and not eliminated either).
The field equations describing the universe as a dynamic system (plus randomness from the Born rule) leave no room for anything else than epiphenomenal conscience. Of course, when you “want” your arm to move, it moves because the system that creates the “will” and the system that “moves” the arm are intertwined, so you can describe the movement both in purely materialistic terms (as the Laplace demon would do) or in terms of a cascade of “conscient decisions”. But the whole point of the epiphenomenism is that being the matter autonomous, the materialistic description is consistent and sufficient by itself to describe and predict the events.
“Under physicalist epiphenomenalism (which is the standard approach to the mind-matter relation)” ← can you give support for this parenthetical claim? It has been some years since I took a philosophy of mind course, but when I did, I got the impression that epiphenomenalism is not the most popular view on the mind-body problem.
What are the alternatives? As long as you accept the autonomy of matter (this is physicalism) there are not degrees of freedom left.
I dont know what is the current majority, but physicalism is clearly majority for scientists, and once you are a physicalist either you are epiphenomenalist or eliminativist. Probably there is a majority of self reported eliminativists, but I take the charitable position of thinking that they don’t really understand the issue.
There are forms of physicalism that are not eliminativist (they see consciousness as something real, for example as a kind of information processing) and are not epiphenomenalist (they hold that mental states can affect the physical world). I hold a view like this, and I would guess most non-dualist philosophers of mind do too.
Personally I think that eliminativism (at least in its most extreme forms) and epiphenomenalism are both intuitively implausible. They contradict my firsthand experience that my consciousness exists and has effects on the observable physical world. So I’m unlikely to accept either of them without a strong argument.
Your will has effects on the world, of course, but it is determined by a physical system.
I developed that position in the first reference of this post (Freedom under naturalistic dualism).
the fact that mind is determined by a physical system not necessarily entail epiphenomenalism. My best analogy is the difference between the object language and the metalanguage. In mathematics (number theory, Godel’s theorem), the metalanguage is embedded in the object language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage#Embedded In this sense, the metalanguage supervenes on (and is determined by) the object language, but is not an epiphenomenon (and not eliminated either).
The field equations describing the universe as a dynamic system (plus randomness from the Born rule) leave no room for anything else than epiphenomenal conscience. Of course, when you “want” your arm to move, it moves because the system that creates the “will” and the system that “moves” the arm are intertwined, so you can describe the movement both in purely materialistic terms (as the Laplace demon would do) or in terms of a cascade of “conscient decisions”. But the whole point of the epiphenomenism is that being the matter autonomous, the materialistic description is consistent and sufficient by itself to describe and predict the events.