Baby You Can Drive My Car, Part 6: The Argument from Self-Evidence

This is the final installment in a series responding to "The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers: http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B004SL4KI0/

The previous installment can be found here: http://mccomplete.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/baby-you-can-drive-my-car-part-5.html

As I explained in my previous post, I don't think knowledge needs to be justified; it just needs to be true.  David Chalmers does not agree.  He wants us (the epiphenomenal us) to have justified knowledge of our own consciousness.  He writes:

Intuitively, our access to conscious experience is not mediated at all.  Conscious experience lies at the center of our epistemic universe; we have access to it directly…What is it that justifies our beliefs about our experiences?...It is having the experiences that justifies the beliefs...There is something intrinsically epistemic about experience.  To have an experience is automatically to stand in some sort of intimate epistemic relation to the experience -- a relation that we might call “acquaintance”.

(Page 194)

Chalmers is saying that experience is self-evident, and I couldn’t agree more.  But if experience is self-evident, then epiphenomenalism must be false.

If epiphenomenalism were true, experiences would be facts.  But facts can only become evidence if they fall into the hands of an epistemological agent.  And if epiphenomenalism is true, the epistemological agents are all out to lunch.

If epiphenomenalism is true, then the only (relevant) epistemological agent is the nonconscious brain.  The nonconscious brain has no access to phenomenal facts.  Since no epistemological agent has access to the phenomenal facts, the phenomenal facts never become evidence.

Epistemological agents have inputs and outputs.  My experiences are inputs to me as an epistemological agent.  Not a functional organization isomorphic to my experiences, not information about my experiences, but my experiences themselves.  That is how I know that in the real world, the world that I inhabit, epiphenomenalism is false.