Epiphenomenalism
Encyclopedia
In philosophy of mind
, epiphenomenalism, also known as Type-E Dualism, is a view that "mental" states do not have any influence on "physical" states.
, Leibniz
and Spinoza
all in their own way began this way of thinking. The idea that even if the animal were conscious nothing would be added to the production of behavior, even in animals of the human type, was first voiced by La Mettrie (1745), and then by Cabanis
(1802), and was further explicated by Hodgson
(1870) and Huxley (1874). Huxley (1874) likened mental phenomena to the whistle on a steam locomotive. However, epiphenomenalism flourished primarily as it found a niche among methodological or scientific behaviorism. In the early 1900s scientific behaviorists
such as Ivan Pavlov
, John B. Watson
, and B. F. Skinner
began the attempt to uncover laws describing the relationship between stimuli and responses, without reference to inner mental phenomena. Instead of adopting a form of eliminativism
or mental fictionalism
, positions that deny that inner mental phenomena exist, a behaviorist was able to adopt epiphenomenalism in order to allow for the existence of mind. However, by the 1960s, scientific behaviourism met substantial difficulties and eventually gave way to the cognitive revolution
. Participants in that revolution, such as Jerry Fodor
, reject epiphenomenalism and insist upon the efficacy of the mind. Fodor even speaks of "epiphobia"—fear that one is becoming an epiphenomenalist.
However, since the cognitive revolution, there have been several who have argued for a version of epiphenomenalism. These more recent versions, however, maintain that only the subjective, qualitative aspects of mental states are epiphenomenal. Imagine both Pierre and a robot eating a cupcake. Unlike the robot, Pierre is conscious of eating the cupcake while the behavior is under way. This subjective experience is often called a quale (plural qualia
), and it describes the private "raw feel" or the subjective "what-it-is-like
" that is the inner accompaniment of many mental states. Thus, while Pierre and the robot are both doing the same thing, only Pierre has the inner conscious experience.
Frank Jackson
(1982), for example, once espoused the following view:
According to epiphenomenalism, mental states like Pierre's pleasurable experience—or, at any rate, their distinctive qualia—are just epiphenomena
; they are side-effects or by-products of physical processes in the body. Pierre, according to epiphenomenalism, might as well be a robot or a zombie
, because conscious mental states do not affect his behavior. If Pierre takes a second bite, it is not caused by his pleasure from the first; If Pierre says, "That was good, so I will take another bite", his speech act is not caused by the preceding pleasure. The conscious experiences that accompany brain processes are causally impotent.
Some thinkers draw distinctions between different varieties of epiphenomenalism. In Consciousness Explained
, Daniel Dennett
' distinguishes between a purely metaphysical sense of epiphenomenalism, in which the epiphenomenon has no causal impact at all, and Huxley's "steam whistle" epiphenomenalism, in which effects exist but are not functionally relevant.
or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of making a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet
et al. (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. Recent research on the Event Related Potential also shows that conscious experience does not occur until the late phase of the potential (P3 or later) that occurs 300 milliseconds or more after the event. In Bregman's Auditory Continuity Illusion
, where a pure tone is followed by broadband noise and the noise is followed by the same pure tone it seems as if the tone occurs throughout the period of noise. This also suggests a delay for processing data before conscious experience occurs. Norretranders has called the delay "The User Illusion
" implying that we only have the illusion of conscious control, most actions being controlled automatically by non-conscious parts of the brain with the conscious mind relegated to the role of spectator.
The scientific data seem to support the idea that conscious experience is created by non-conscious processes in the brain (i.e., there is subliminal processing that becomes conscious experience). These results have been interpreted to suggest that people are capable of action before conscious experience of the decision to act occurs. Some argue that this supports epiphenomenalism, since it shows that the feeling of making a decision to act is actually an epiphenomenon; the action happens before the decision, so the decision did not cause the action to occur.
Gilbert Ryle
's phrase, a "category mistake
". Just as there is no Cartesian "ghost in the machine
", there are no ghostly events that accompany behavior in an inner theater. Consciousness belongs not to the category of objects of reference, but rather to the category of ways of doing things. To be attentive is to do things with focus and care, not for something to be happening in the ghostly theater that Ryle lampooned as a dualist dogma.
Functionalists
chart a different course, accepting that there is a system of mental events mediating stimulus and response, but asserting that this system is "topic neutral" and capable of being realized in various ways. The topic neutrality of the mind implies the denial of epiphenomenalism, which, as a kind of property dualism, fixes consciousness as a non-neutral, non-physical topic.
Eliminative materialists
, on the other hand, assert that the concept of mind aims to fix reference to a non-physical topic; so they disagree with the philosophical behaviorist analysis, as well as the functionalist analysis. Eliminative materialism holds, however, that this dualistic aim of "folk psychology
" is a fatal error built into mental concepts. So it would be better to eliminate the concept of mind, and concepts implicated in it such as desire and belief, in favor of an emerging neurocomputational account. (A more moderate eliminativist position would maintain what J. L. Mackie
called an error theory, stripping false beliefs away from the problematic concepts but not eliminating them, leaving intact a legitimate core of meaning.)
's results are quoted in favor of epiphenomenalism, but he believes subjects still have a "conscious veto", since the readiness potential does not invariably lead to an action. In Freedom Evolves
, materialistic
soft determinist
Daniel Dennett
argues that the no-free-will conclusion is based on dubious assumptions about the location of consciousness.
Libet, says Dennett, tells when the readiness potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur.
Many argue that data such as the Bereitschaftspotential undermine, rather than support, epiphenomenalism. Such experiments rely on the subject reporting the point in time when conscious experience apparently occurs, which relies on the subject being able to consciously perform an action, and on conscious experience being effective enough to prompt a response. Such a premise contradicts epiphenomenalism, which claims that conscious experience has no effects and therefore cannot be measured. Hence, so the argument goes, any experiment that detects whether or when conscious experience occurs argues strongly against, not for, epiphenomenalism. Alternatively, a property dualist
in acceptance of physical mental states might respond to this by arguing that the subjective conscious experience or qualia believed to be mapped to the measured or objective conscious experience does not prompt a response and has no effects.
Another criticism of epiphenomenalism is that the presence of the theory of epiphenomenalism seems to contradict the very idea. Most would agree that thinking is a mental process, but, if epiphenomenalism is true, how could someone ever express the idea of epiphenomenalism? It would be impossible, because this "expressing" would require the banned connection between mind and behavior. If epiphenomenalism is true and thinking is a mental process, then its truth is ineffable. So in the example above, Pierre cannot convey his pleasure. Alternatively, a property dualist in acceptance of physical mental states might respond to this by arguing that mental processes such as thinking are both physical (objective) and non physical (in this case subjective).
Green (2003) has argued that epiphenomenalism does not even provide a satisfactory ‘out’ from the problem of interaction posed by substance dualism. According to Green, epiphenomenalism implies a one-way form of interactionism that is just as hard to conceive of as the two-way form embodied in substance dualism. If it is a problem how mental events can influence physical events, how is it any less of a problem how physical events can influence mental ones? Green suggests that the assumption that it is less of a problem may arise from the unexamined belief that physical events have some sort of primacy over mental ones. Alternatively, a property dualist in acceptance of physical mental states might respond to this by arguing that the initial problem of how non physical events can influence physical ones was a product of an inference of physical determinism, and not a problem of metaphysical conception.
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
, epiphenomenalism, also known as Type-E Dualism, is a view that "mental" states do not have any influence on "physical" states.
Background
The history of epiphenomenalism goes back to the post-Cartesian attempt to solve the riddle of Cartesian dualism, i.e., of how mind and body could interact. La MettrieJulien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment...
, Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
and Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
all in their own way began this way of thinking. The idea that even if the animal were conscious nothing would be added to the production of behavior, even in animals of the human type, was first voiced by La Mettrie (1745), and then by Cabanis
Pierre Jean George Cabanis
-Further reading:- Further reading :----...
(1802), and was further explicated by Hodgson
Hodgson
Hodgson is a surname. In Britain, the Hodgson surname was the 173rd most common in 1881 and the 206th most common in 1998. In the United States of America, Hodgson was the 3753rd most popular surname in the 1990 census.-Origin and Meaning:The surname authority P. H...
(1870) and Huxley (1874). Huxley (1874) likened mental phenomena to the whistle on a steam locomotive. However, epiphenomenalism flourished primarily as it found a niche among methodological or scientific behaviorism. In the early 1900s scientific behaviorists
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
such as Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a famous Russian physiologist. Although he made significant contributions to psychology, he was not in fact a psychologist himself but was a mathematician and actually had strong distaste for the field....
, John B. Watson
John B. Watson
John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Watson promoted a change in psychology through his address Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it which was given at Columbia University in 1913...
, and B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, baseball enthusiast, social philosopher and poet...
began the attempt to uncover laws describing the relationship between stimuli and responses, without reference to inner mental phenomena. Instead of adopting a form of eliminativism
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
or mental fictionalism
Fictionalism
Fictionalism is a methodological theory in philosophy that suggests that statements of a certain sort should not be taken to be literally true, but merely as a useful fiction...
, positions that deny that inner mental phenomena exist, a behaviorist was able to adopt epiphenomenalism in order to allow for the existence of mind. However, by the 1960s, scientific behaviourism met substantial difficulties and eventually gave way to the cognitive revolution
Cognitive revolution
The cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
. Participants in that revolution, such as Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
, reject epiphenomenalism and insist upon the efficacy of the mind. Fodor even speaks of "epiphobia"—fear that one is becoming an epiphenomenalist.
However, since the cognitive revolution, there have been several who have argued for a version of epiphenomenalism. These more recent versions, however, maintain that only the subjective, qualitative aspects of mental states are epiphenomenal. Imagine both Pierre and a robot eating a cupcake. Unlike the robot, Pierre is conscious of eating the cupcake while the behavior is under way. This subjective experience is often called a quale (plural qualia
Qualia
Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...
), and it describes the private "raw feel" or the subjective "what-it-is-like
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
" that is the inner accompaniment of many mental states. Thus, while Pierre and the robot are both doing the same thing, only Pierre has the inner conscious experience.
Frank Jackson
Frank Cameron Jackson
Frank Cameron Jackson is an Australian philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor and former Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. In 2007-2008, he also became a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University...
(1982), for example, once espoused the following view:
According to epiphenomenalism, mental states like Pierre's pleasurable experience—or, at any rate, their distinctive qualia—are just epiphenomena
Epiphenomenon
An epiphenomenon is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon.-Medicine:...
; they are side-effects or by-products of physical processes in the body. Pierre, according to epiphenomenalism, might as well be a robot or a zombie
Philosophical zombie
A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience...
, because conscious mental states do not affect his behavior. If Pierre takes a second bite, it is not caused by his pleasure from the first; If Pierre says, "That was good, so I will take another bite", his speech act is not caused by the preceding pleasure. The conscious experiences that accompany brain processes are causally impotent.
Some thinkers draw distinctions between different varieties of epiphenomenalism. In Consciousness Explained
Consciousness Explained
Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.-Synopsis:...
, Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
' distinguishes between a purely metaphysical sense of epiphenomenalism, in which the epiphenomenon has no causal impact at all, and Huxley's "steam whistle" epiphenomenalism, in which effects exist but are not functionally relevant.
Arguments for
A large body of neurophysiological data seems to support epiphenomenalism. Some of the oldest such data is the BereitschaftspotentialBereitschaftspotential
In neurology, the Bereitschaftspotential or BP , also called the pre-motor potential or readiness potential , is a measure of activity in the motor cortex of the brain leading up to voluntary muscle movement. The BP is a manifestation of cortical contribution to the pre-motor planning of volitional...
or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of making a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet April 12, 1916, Chicago, Illinois - July 23, 2007, Davis, California) was a pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco...
et al. (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. Recent research on the Event Related Potential also shows that conscious experience does not occur until the late phase of the potential (P3 or later) that occurs 300 milliseconds or more after the event. In Bregman's Auditory Continuity Illusion
Illusory continuity of tones
The illusory continuity of tones is the auditory illusion caused when a tone is interrupted for a short time , during which a narrow band of noise is played...
, where a pure tone is followed by broadband noise and the noise is followed by the same pure tone it seems as if the tone occurs throughout the period of noise. This also suggests a delay for processing data before conscious experience occurs. Norretranders has called the delay "The User Illusion
The User Illusion
The user illusion is the illusion created for the user by a human-computer interface, for example the visual metaphor of a desktop used in many graphical user interfaces. The term originated at Xerox PARC....
" implying that we only have the illusion of conscious control, most actions being controlled automatically by non-conscious parts of the brain with the conscious mind relegated to the role of spectator.
The scientific data seem to support the idea that conscious experience is created by non-conscious processes in the brain (i.e., there is subliminal processing that becomes conscious experience). These results have been interpreted to suggest that people are capable of action before conscious experience of the decision to act occurs. Some argue that this supports epiphenomenalism, since it shows that the feeling of making a decision to act is actually an epiphenomenon; the action happens before the decision, so the decision did not cause the action to occur.
Some critical responses
The philosophical behaviorists (as opposed to scientific behaviourists) reject epiphenomenalism on the grounds that it is, in eliminative materialistEliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...
's phrase, a "category mistake
Category mistake
A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error in which "things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another", or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property...
". Just as there is no Cartesian "ghost in the machine
Ghost in the machine
The "ghost in the machine" is the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's description of René Descartes' mind-body dualism. The phrase was introduced in Ryle's book The Concept of Mind to highlight the perceived absurdity of dualist systems like Descartes' where mental activity carries on in parallel...
", there are no ghostly events that accompany behavior in an inner theater. Consciousness belongs not to the category of objects of reference, but rather to the category of ways of doing things. To be attentive is to do things with focus and care, not for something to be happening in the ghostly theater that Ryle lampooned as a dualist dogma.
Functionalists
Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental...
chart a different course, accepting that there is a system of mental events mediating stimulus and response, but asserting that this system is "topic neutral" and capable of being realized in various ways. The topic neutrality of the mind implies the denial of epiphenomenalism, which, as a kind of property dualism, fixes consciousness as a non-neutral, non-physical topic.
Eliminative materialists
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
, on the other hand, assert that the concept of mind aims to fix reference to a non-physical topic; so they disagree with the philosophical behaviorist analysis, as well as the functionalist analysis. Eliminative materialism holds, however, that this dualistic aim of "folk psychology
Folk psychology
Folk psychology is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology...
" is a fatal error built into mental concepts. So it would be better to eliminate the concept of mind, and concepts implicated in it such as desire and belief, in favor of an emerging neurocomputational account. (A more moderate eliminativist position would maintain what J. L. Mackie
J. L. Mackie
John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on meta-ethics, especially his defence of moral skepticism.He authored six...
called an error theory, stripping false beliefs away from the problematic concepts but not eliminating them, leaving intact a legitimate core of meaning.)
Arguments against
Benjamin LibetBenjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet April 12, 1916, Chicago, Illinois - July 23, 2007, Davis, California) was a pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco...
's results are quoted in favor of epiphenomenalism, but he believes subjects still have a "conscious veto", since the readiness potential does not invariably lead to an action. In Freedom Evolves
Freedom Evolves
Freedom Evolves is a 2003 popular science and philosophy book by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett describes the book as an installment of a life-long philosophical project, earlier parts of which were The Intentional Stance, Consciousness Explained and Elbow Room...
, materialistic
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
soft determinist
Compatibilism
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent. It may, however, be more accurate to say that compatibilists define 'free will' in a way that allows it to co-exist with determinism...
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
argues that the no-free-will conclusion is based on dubious assumptions about the location of consciousness.
Libet, says Dennett, tells when the readiness potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur.
Many argue that data such as the Bereitschaftspotential undermine, rather than support, epiphenomenalism. Such experiments rely on the subject reporting the point in time when conscious experience apparently occurs, which relies on the subject being able to consciously perform an action, and on conscious experience being effective enough to prompt a response. Such a premise contradicts epiphenomenalism, which claims that conscious experience has no effects and therefore cannot be measured. Hence, so the argument goes, any experiment that detects whether or when conscious experience occurs argues strongly against, not for, epiphenomenalism. Alternatively, a property dualist
Property dualism
Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is constituted of just one kind of substance - the physical kind - there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties...
in acceptance of physical mental states might respond to this by arguing that the subjective conscious experience or qualia believed to be mapped to the measured or objective conscious experience does not prompt a response and has no effects.
Another criticism of epiphenomenalism is that the presence of the theory of epiphenomenalism seems to contradict the very idea. Most would agree that thinking is a mental process, but, if epiphenomenalism is true, how could someone ever express the idea of epiphenomenalism? It would be impossible, because this "expressing" would require the banned connection between mind and behavior. If epiphenomenalism is true and thinking is a mental process, then its truth is ineffable. So in the example above, Pierre cannot convey his pleasure. Alternatively, a property dualist in acceptance of physical mental states might respond to this by arguing that mental processes such as thinking are both physical (objective) and non physical (in this case subjective).
Green (2003) has argued that epiphenomenalism does not even provide a satisfactory ‘out’ from the problem of interaction posed by substance dualism. According to Green, epiphenomenalism implies a one-way form of interactionism that is just as hard to conceive of as the two-way form embodied in substance dualism. If it is a problem how mental events can influence physical events, how is it any less of a problem how physical events can influence mental ones? Green suggests that the assumption that it is less of a problem may arise from the unexamined belief that physical events have some sort of primacy over mental ones. Alternatively, a property dualist in acceptance of physical mental states might respond to this by arguing that the initial problem of how non physical events can influence physical ones was a product of an inference of physical determinism, and not a problem of metaphysical conception.
See also
- Specious presentSpecious presentThe specious present is the time duration wherein one's perceptions are considered to be in the present. Time perception studies the sense of time, which differs from other senses since time cannot be directly perceived but must be reconstructed by the brain....
- Problem of mental causationProblem of mental causationThe problem of mental causation is a conceptual issue in the philosophy of mind. That problem, in short, is how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions...
- Philosophy of mindPhilosophy of mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
- Dualism (philosophy of mind)Dualism (philosophy of mind)In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical....
- QualiaQualiaQualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...
- Frank JacksonFrank Cameron JacksonFrank Cameron Jackson is an Australian philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor and former Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. In 2007-2008, he also became a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University...
- George SantayanaGeorge SantayanaGeorge Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters...
External links
by William Robinson.- Epiphenomenalism - an article by Sven Walter in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Wikibook on consciousness
- Exit Epiphenomenalism - Analysis by Rivas and Van Dongen.
- Strange Ideas