Baby You Can Drive My Car, Part 3: The Nonconscious Brain

Thinking about epiphenomenalism can be very frustrating.  Until very recently, I would often slip into the linguistic pattern of referring to the epiphenomenal brain as “unconscious”.  But Chalmers would surely object to such a usage.  Zombies are unconscious.  Zombie brains are unconscious.  But our brains are not unconscious, because they have conscious experiences associated with them.

Chalmers would probably want to say that the epiphenomenal brain is conscious.  Metaphysically speaking, Chalmers might argue, the conscious experiences might not just be associated with the brain, but might be properties of the brain itself.  Conscious experiences might be phenomenal qualities of the functional organization of, or the information encoded in, the brain.  Metaphysically speaking, the brain might be an ontological object with a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect.

In my opinion, to refer to the physical brain as conscious would be grossly misleading, and only add to the confusion.  As in the psychons argument (see http://mccomplete.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/psychons-and-intentyons-part-1-chalmers.html), we can subtract the phenomenal properties from Chalmers’ brain and arrive at Chalmers’ physical brain.  The physical brain is self contained and self sufficient, and it has no access to the phenomenal properties.

Given this vexing situation, I hope that Chalmers would agree to call the physical brain nonconcsious.

If we can agree on that, maybe we can agree that the epiphenomenal mind is a nonconcsious epistemological agent.  Epistemological agents take inputs (assumptions) and return outputs (conclusions).  The epistemological functions of the mind are exhausted by the nonconscious brain.  The nonconscious brain is a self-sufficient epistemological agent, and any conscious experiences that may be associated (in some sense) with the brain add nothing to its epistemological agency.

The epiphenomenal mind is an epistemological subject, but not an epistemological agent.  The epiphenomenal mind is a consumer of beliefs, but not a producer of beliefs.  The conscious mind will believe a proposition if and only if the nonconscious brain has generated an isomorphic judgment.