Abstract
This article defends epiphenomenalism against criticisms raised in Dwayne Moore’s “On Robinson’s Response to the Self-Stultifying Objection”.
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Notes
(i) “In coherent ways” permits us to allow the possibility of quantum indeterminacy in the background of occasional action potentials, while dismissing such events from relevance to the present discussion. (ii) Proposing over determination is not helpful in the present context, since any form of multiple causation that allows non-physical events to make a genuine difference to behavior will require them to have neural firing effects that are not sufficiently accounted for by neurosynaptic causes.
“Physical” rather than “neural” here so that a wide variety of physicalist views can be included. I have in mind representationalist views, which may hold that the occurrence of an experience requires more than a neural event–it may, e.g., also partly consist in the obtaining of (physical) causal relations between neural events and properties of external objects.
For discussion, see Schwitzgebel (2010).
For relevance of other appropriate conditions, see Moore’s note 7.
They may be said to be that by which, or through which we perceive things. I have criticized some recent views on “transparency” in Robinson (2004), but we find here a good sense in which our qualitative events may properly be said to be transparent.
Epiphenomenalism can allow for failures in our cognitive system that introduce false memories about our qualitative events. For purposes of this response, I follow Moore in assuming the idealization of a properly working system–see the last two sentences of his note 7.
A related idea is that when we have a phenomenal belief our epistemic situation includes the qualitative event that the belief is about–and thus zombies can never be in our epistemic situation. I do not think this approach can give us what it seems we want from it; for explanation of why, see Robinson (2006).
I.e., the view that it is metaphysically impossible for phenomenal qualities to stand in any causal relations other than those in which they stand in this world.
References
Grahek, N. 2007. Feeling pain and being in pain, 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press/Bradford.
Moore, D. 2012. “On Robinson’s response to the self-stultifying objection”. The Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4: 627–641.
Robinson, W.S. 2004. Understanding phenomenal consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, W.S. 2006. Knowing epiphenomena. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13: 85–100.
Robinson, W.S. 2011. Phenomenal realist physicalism implies coherency of epiphenomenalist meaning. Journal of Consciousness Studies 19(3–4): 145–163.
Schwitzgebel, E. 2010. “Introspection”. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (fall 2010 edition), ed. Zalta, E. N.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank David Alexander for helpful discussion about the issues addressed here.
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Robinson, W.S. Experiencing is not Observing: A Response to Dwayne Moore on Epiphenomenalism and Self-Stultification. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 185–192 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0119-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0119-y