Well my folks gave me this really awesome book for Christmas called "The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten."
Basically it's a whole book of thought experiments (for those of you not familiar, these are imaginary scenarios that philosophers come up with to strip problems down to their bare essences.)
I thought it might be fun to post one on here and see what people think, so here it is:
Epiphenia was a remarkable planet. So like Earth in appearance, and yet its inhabitants were different in one remarkable way. As one of them, Huxley, explained to the visiting Earthling Dirk, the Epiphens had long ago 'discovered' that their thoughts did not affect their actions. Thoughts were the effects of bodily processes, not the other way around. Dirk found this baffling.
"You can't really believe this", he protested to Huxley. "For instance, when we met in this bar you said, "Gee I could kill for a beer," and ordered one. Are you saying that the thought "I want a beer" had no effect on your actions?"
"Of course it didn't," replied Huxley, as though the question were idiotic. "We have thoughts and these often precede actions. But we know full well that these thought's aren't causing the actions. My body and brain were already gearing up to order a beer. The thought "I could kill a beer" was just something that popped into my head as a result of what was happening in the physical brain and body. Thoughts don't cause actions."
"For Epiphens maybe," replied Dirk.
"Well I can't see what's so different about humans," said Huxley, and for a while at least, nor could Dirk.
Epiphenomalism is the view that thoughts and other mental events do not cause anything in the physical world, including our actions. Rather, that the brain and body work like some kind of purely physical machine, and our concious experience is a by-product, caused by the machine but not affecting it.
But if what goes on in our minds has no impact on what we actually do, the world we think of is actually an illusion. But is this really the consequence of accepting epiphenomalism? The imaginary land of Epiphenia is designed to test the idea that no one can live with the truth of epiphenomalism.
Is it really possible to divorce what we believe about the link between thought and action and how we actaully live? For example, take a situation where the thinking seems to be crucial. Say you're trying to work out a solution to a tricky logical or mathematical problem. Eventually, the eureka moment comes. In this case, surely the actual thinking has to play a part in the explanation for your actions?
Well, no. Why can't I believe that the concious experience of thinking is just a byproduct of the computing that is going on at brain level? It may be the necessary by-product. But just as the noise that a boiling pot of water makes is an inevitable by-product of the heating without meaning it is the noise which cooks the egg, so thought could be the necessary by-product of neural computation that doesn't itself produce the solution to the problem.
Indeed if you think about thinking, there does seem to be something almost involuntary about it. Solutions 'come to us', for example, not we to them. Reflect on what it really feels like to think, and the idea that it is a by-product of a process you are not concious of may not seem quite so fanciful.
:)