Baby You Can Drive My Car, Part 5: The Argument from Knowledge

Chalmers is very clear about his challenge to the interactionist.  Chalmers wants an argument to “show us why the explanatory irrelevance of consciousness simply cannot be true.” (Page 194)

Chalmers suggests three arguments against epiphenomenalism: the argument from knowledge, the argument from memory, and the argument from reference.  My argument is none of these, but in particular, it is not the argument from knowledge.

My lack of interest in the knowledge argument is based on broader theoretical considerations.  What is knowledge, after all?  Philosophers have traditionally accepted four conditions for knowledge.  To say that epistemological agent A knows proposition P implies four things:

1. A believes P.
2. A has certainty, or high confidence, in P.
3. P is true.
4. A’s belief in P is justified.

Conditions 1, 2 and 3 look good to me, but I can’t accept condition 4.  Some of our knowledge is knowledge of axioms, such as the reliability of induction and memory.  Axioms seem to have no justification at all.  Furthermore, much of our non-axiomatic knowledge is derived, at least in part, from the axioms themselves, so it’s hard to see how the non-axiomatic knowledge can be any more justified than the axioms it derives from.  (How did we come to be in possession of these axioms?  That’s an interesting and important question, but for the current discussion, it is beside the point.)

Once we dispense with condition 4, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why an epiphenomenal mind couldn’t possess knowledge of its own consciousness.  A nonconscious epistemological agent could believe (with any level of certainty you like) that there are phenomenal properties associated with its functional states.  If we could build such an agent, we could simply hard-wire it with the assumption that there are such properties.  And since the epiphenomenal mind is conscious by assumption, we get condition 3 for free.