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.
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).