Yes
Consciousness is Epiphenomenal

The Illusion Argument

 

 

We often report that our conscious reasoning was causally implicated in our behaviour. (What caused you to read this poster? Perhaps it seemed to you that it looked interesting, so you chose to do so...) However, studies have shown that we can report conscious agency when it cannot, in fact, be the case. For example, Wegner and Wheatley (1999a) managed to elicit reports of conscious choice when the timing between percept and action precluded it. In their 1999b, they offer other examples of apparent mental causation that cannot, in fact, causally involve conscious states., and discuss some of the factors that can explain this misattribution (the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought in question relative to the action).

Confident and non-coerced reports by normal subjects can "attest" to the causal relevance of conscious states when those states could not have been causally relevant. Therefore, consciousness is epiphenomenal.

Response:

Showing that some allegedly efficacious events are not efficacious is not sufficient to establish that none are. This is the fallacy of hasty induction. Yes, we can be wrong, but it doesn't follow that we always, or even often, are.

Furthermore, Wegner and Wheatley come close to out-Huming Hume. "Hume realized that the will, like causal force more generally, is not a thing that inheres in objects or people, but rather is a perception that follows from the constant conjunction of events" (1999b, p. 480) Their position teeters between parallelism (the mental and the physical are mysteriously in sync) and causality nihilism. "...[T]he mental system that keeps [thoughts of actions] co-ordinated with the actions is itself an intriguing mechanism...The real causal mechanism is the marvelously intricate web of causation that is the topic of scientific psychology." (ibid, p. 490). But if causation is all in the eye of the beholder, what is there for science to discover?


 On to next page, The Evolutionary Argument

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