Q&A: Can One Believe in Epiphenomenology
Can One Believe in Epiphenomenology
Question
Someone who believes in epiphenomenology holds (roughly speaking) that the soul does indeed exist alongside matter, but the causal direction is one-way—from matter toward spirit. The spirit does not affect matter at all, and matter is locked within its own framework. If so, how does the process work by which the brain (not the intellect, since it has no influence on the process) arrives at the conclusion that the spiritual element exists, without that element being part of the causal chain?
Answer
Good question. It is true that empirically it is unlikely that he would arrive at that conclusion, since in order for him to encounter spirit, spirit would have to affect him in some way. But perhaps he could arrive at that conclusion through theoretical-philosophical considerations rather than empirical ones. Still, it is genuinely hard for me to defend a position that I do not agree with.
If anything, you should ask how it happened that over the course of evolution such a tight correlation arose between qualia of aversion (such as pain, fear, and the like) and the corresponding brain states (flight, avoidance, and so on). If epiphenomenalism were true, we should expect random qualia of all kinds (including supreme pleasure) together with brain states characteristic of pain, since there is no “top-down” causation—from mental states to brain states—on which natural selection could apply the appropriate filtering.