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In philosophy of mind this view is broadly construed as 'Epiphenomenalism'. The idea being that consciousness (any mental activity that shows up for us) is like

In philosophy of mind this view is broadly construed as 'Epiphenomenalism'. The idea being that consciousness (any mental activity that shows up for us) is like the steam coming off of a locomotive, just a by product of underlying physical events. Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain). Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? In some ways this strikes me as obviously true, if unintuitive at first.

amelius 9y ago
Well, one reason to believe otherwise is the simple fact that we are talking about consciousness. If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.
- automoton1 9y ago
  I don't see how talking about consciousness is necessarily a limitation to it being a by-product of physical processes. It could be that consciousness is simply an emergent property (a by-product) of the communication of billions of neurons that are connected in trillions of ways. Where neurons are emergent of chemical phenomena which are emergent of atomic phenomena and so on. I'm probably greatly simplifying the dependencies of phenomena, but I think that consciousness is most definitely based upon physical processes. The current evidence makes me believe that consciousness is a by-product of evolution, which is a by-product of the conditions on our planet. So it goes.
  - incadenza 9y ago
    I do agree, but to be fair, Epiphenomenalism makes a slightly stronger point. Not only is consciousness entirely a physical process, but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. There is no feedback loop here. So, instead of Touch hot flame -> Feel sensation of pain -> Move hand It's... Touch hot flame -> brain processes event and sends signals to move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events. EDIT: This does beg the question 'why do we have consciousness, then?' or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'. Which are interesting questions, and probably explained by darwinian processes, but don't really get at the heart of it. My thoughts anyhow.
    - ffwd 9y ago
      > but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?' All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become: Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events. Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.
  - Viliam1234 9y ago
    "Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of brain" cannot be literally true, if you are able to talk about your thoughts. Because talking about your thoughts means that somehow your thoughts influenced at least the part of your brain that guides your mouth. Also, how would the ability to think evolve in our species, if our thoughts never had an impact on our behavior? Then they could not provide any evolutionary advantage. It is possible (and quite likely) that some weaker version of that statement is true; e.g. that there are many things that brain does independently on our thoughts. But claiming that there is "no" impact is just trying to be edgy. Yes, such absolute statement sounds more interesting, but it is wrong.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  That assumes that consciousness is a thing we correctly pointing to. As far as we know it might as well be a completely ignorant idea. Some questions can't be answered through language they can only be conceptualized through language and that's a very important distinction IMO.
- psyc 9y ago
  That's very arbitrary. We talk about everything we notice, external or introspective. There's no infinite regression, either. Consciousness notices itself. That's kind of one of its hallmarks.
- whytaka 9y ago
  Right. That we talk about consciousness suggests that the physical drives have feedback of the perceived experience and are able to make determinations about it which is experienced again in perception as thoughts. I firmly believe that most if not all interpretations of the 'world' is processed and complete before it even reaches perception. How I recognize objects, how I feel at the moment, and my literal thoughts themselves. But I cannot deny that the brain activity that processes stimulus into interpretations into perceived experience is also very aware of the perceived experience. Perhaps it's as though our brain has a functional programming style in that various stimulus is operated upon somewhat independently by different regions of the brain, but the operation of synthesis takes the previous perceived experience (that is, the output of the previous synthesis op) as part of the input along with the various outputs of newly processed stimulus to create a new synthesized state that has reliable continuity.
catawbasam 9y ago
But why would the brain be the only factor? What about the rest of your body, and the universe beyond?
- ewjordan 9y ago
  Because with very few (important but specific) exceptions, reductionism works, and the explanations for physical behaviors are present locally. The only reasons I've ever heard to look outside the brain to figure out how it functions tend to be motivated by a hopeful dualism.
  - catawbasam 9y ago
    Maybe more specific examples would be useful. If my lungs are failing, my brain gets less oxygen, and functions differently. When my childen are hungry, they definitely behave differently, and I attribute the cause of that to their lack of food. If my wife or friend is in a lousy mood, my mood may sour too. If my team scores, I cheer in excitement -- even when the team is playing hundreds of miles away. The brain surely plays a role in each of these cases, but I would assign causality outside it.
szemet 9y ago
Another common objection (just to mention), is the distinction between good and bad feelings, suffering and pleasure, etc... If ephiphenonalism is true, those categorizations should be purely learned: otherwise it is hard to explain why (evolutionary) harmful things usually cause bad experience and suffering, while useful things usually cause pleasure. For example: I could feel intense pain and suffering eating a cake, it would not count if my unconscious decision was to eat it. So either it is pure luck that I enjoy it, or I learned to enjoy a lot of (otherwise neutral) feelings.
- incadenza 9y ago
  Right, it certainly seems that feelings exist to motivate certain behaviors, if nothing else. Anybody who thinks about their own behaviors should readily confirm this. Yeah, I just don't have a good answer for it other than to bite the bullet and say its just a crazy coincidence. The incentives of our unconscious brain are roughly aligned with what feels good. But it doesn't seem satisfactory to me either.
mwfunk 9y ago
I tend to agree. I think of the conscious mind as more like an executive at the top of a huge organization, with like 10 different layers of management and tens of thousands of mostly unseen people beneath it in the org chart. Every time you go up a level of management, the information that flows upward becomes more high-level and abbreviated, because that information is flowing to people that have to make very high-level decisions about things. The executive that everything ultimately flows up to is still exposed to a tremendous amount of information, but it's an almost comically simplified view of the whole picture. Everyone involved (including the executive) can only hope that every layer of simplification always retains the most important and most accurate information, to maximize the executive's ability to make good decisions. Likewise our minds have layers upon layers of processing, from raw sensory input that gets collected into perceptions of discrete objects, up through the instincts and memories that decide which of those objects are threats (and if so, which of those threats should trigger the fight-or-flight response, etc.). That's not even getting to the more abstract processes that contribute to feelings of tribalism, thoughts on economics, religion, existentialism, and so on. Most abstract of all (IMO) is how the brain puts everything together to trick us into thinking that we can sense what's going on within other people's minds (empathy, basically, which gives us reasonable educated guesses about how other people are responding to us, while tricking us into thinking that we understand other people far more than we really do). The conscious mind can only make decisions about high-level data that the endless layers of the subconscious prepares for it, like managers presenting their executives with high-level status reports condensed from mountains of low-level data. The quality of the executive's decisions are capped by both the the executive's own rationality, as well as the quality of the condensed data that gets passed up the chain. A real life example is someone who feels threatened when they see someone of another race or religion. Such a person might be being rational in their own way, in that they're making decisions based on what they think are facts about the world and their place in it. But such a person doesn't realize that fear or other human flaws are causing garbage data to propagate up to their conscious mind. A racist's problem, for example, is that they're often just rationally responding to the garbage data that is being given to them by their subconscious. They fear people that look different from them because that's what's in the status reports that their subconscious prepares for them every week, but they haven't figured out yet that their own mind is an unreliable narrator for the world around them. We all are unreliable narrators for ourselves, and there's no way to avoid it- the best we can do is try to understand it and make our best effort to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and rationality about everything. I don't pretend to know anything about any of this stuff on an academic level, this is just a view that I've come around to over the years. I'm just a lifelong armchair philosopher, and this is the best I've been able to come up with so far.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain). You mean your experiences have no real impact. Your thoughts are not necessarily qualia. >Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? Who says your consciousness isn't physical?

amelius 9y ago

Well, one reason to believe otherwise is the simple fact that we are talking about consciousness. If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.

automoton1 9y ago
I don't see how talking about consciousness is necessarily a limitation to it being a by-product of physical processes. It could be that consciousness is simply an emergent property (a by-product) of the communication of billions of neurons that are connected in trillions of ways. Where neurons are emergent of chemical phenomena which are emergent of atomic phenomena and so on. I'm probably greatly simplifying the dependencies of phenomena, but I think that consciousness is most definitely based upon physical processes. The current evidence makes me believe that consciousness is a by-product of evolution, which is a by-product of the conditions on our planet. So it goes.
- incadenza 9y ago
  I do agree, but to be fair, Epiphenomenalism makes a slightly stronger point. Not only is consciousness entirely a physical process, but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. There is no feedback loop here. So, instead of Touch hot flame -> Feel sensation of pain -> Move hand It's... Touch hot flame -> brain processes event and sends signals to move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events. EDIT: This does beg the question 'why do we have consciousness, then?' or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'. Which are interesting questions, and probably explained by darwinian processes, but don't really get at the heart of it. My thoughts anyhow.
  - ffwd 9y ago
    > but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?' All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become: Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events. Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.
- Viliam1234 9y ago
  "Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of brain" cannot be literally true, if you are able to talk about your thoughts. Because talking about your thoughts means that somehow your thoughts influenced at least the part of your brain that guides your mouth. Also, how would the ability to think evolve in our species, if our thoughts never had an impact on our behavior? Then they could not provide any evolutionary advantage. It is possible (and quite likely) that some weaker version of that statement is true; e.g. that there are many things that brain does independently on our thoughts. But claiming that there is "no" impact is just trying to be edgy. Yes, such absolute statement sounds more interesting, but it is wrong.
ThomPete 9y ago
That assumes that consciousness is a thing we correctly pointing to. As far as we know it might as well be a completely ignorant idea. Some questions can't be answered through language they can only be conceptualized through language and that's a very important distinction IMO.
psyc 9y ago
That's very arbitrary. We talk about everything we notice, external or introspective. There's no infinite regression, either. Consciousness notices itself. That's kind of one of its hallmarks.
whytaka 9y ago
Right. That we talk about consciousness suggests that the physical drives have feedback of the perceived experience and are able to make determinations about it which is experienced again in perception as thoughts. I firmly believe that most if not all interpretations of the 'world' is processed and complete before it even reaches perception. How I recognize objects, how I feel at the moment, and my literal thoughts themselves. But I cannot deny that the brain activity that processes stimulus into interpretations into perceived experience is also very aware of the perceived experience. Perhaps it's as though our brain has a functional programming style in that various stimulus is operated upon somewhat independently by different regions of the brain, but the operation of synthesis takes the previous perceived experience (that is, the output of the previous synthesis op) as part of the input along with the various outputs of newly processed stimulus to create a new synthesized state that has reliable continuity.

catawbasam 9y ago

But why would the brain be the only factor? What about the rest of your body, and the universe beyond?

ewjordan 9y ago
Because with very few (important but specific) exceptions, reductionism works, and the explanations for physical behaviors are present locally. The only reasons I've ever heard to look outside the brain to figure out how it functions tend to be motivated by a hopeful dualism.
- catawbasam 9y ago
  Maybe more specific examples would be useful. If my lungs are failing, my brain gets less oxygen, and functions differently. When my childen are hungry, they definitely behave differently, and I attribute the cause of that to their lack of food. If my wife or friend is in a lousy mood, my mood may sour too. If my team scores, I cheer in excitement -- even when the team is playing hundreds of miles away. The brain surely plays a role in each of these cases, but I would assign causality outside it.

szemet 9y ago

Another common objection (just to mention), is the distinction between good and bad feelings, suffering and pleasure, etc... If ephiphenonalism is true, those categorizations should be purely learned: otherwise it is hard to explain why (evolutionary) harmful things usually cause bad experience and suffering, while useful things usually cause pleasure. For example: I could feel intense pain and suffering eating a cake, it would not count if my unconscious decision was to eat it. So either it is pure luck that I enjoy it, or I learned to enjoy a lot of (otherwise neutral) feelings.

incadenza 9y ago
Right, it certainly seems that feelings exist to motivate certain behaviors, if nothing else. Anybody who thinks about their own behaviors should readily confirm this. Yeah, I just don't have a good answer for it other than to bite the bullet and say its just a crazy coincidence. The incentives of our unconscious brain are roughly aligned with what feels good. But it doesn't seem satisfactory to me either.

mwfunk 9y ago

I tend to agree. I think of the conscious mind as more like an executive at the top of a huge organization, with like 10 different layers of management and tens of thousands of mostly unseen people beneath it in the org chart. Every time you go up a level of management, the information that flows upward becomes more high-level and abbreviated, because that information is flowing to people that have to make very high-level decisions about things. The executive that everything ultimately flows up to is still exposed to a tremendous amount of information, but it's an almost comically simplified view of the whole picture. Everyone involved (including the executive) can only hope that every layer of simplification always retains the most important and most accurate information, to maximize the executive's ability to make good decisions. Likewise our minds have layers upon layers of processing, from raw sensory input that gets collected into perceptions of discrete objects, up through the instincts and memories that decide which of those objects are threats (and if so, which of those threats should trigger the fight-or-flight response, etc.). That's not even getting to the more abstract processes that contribute to feelings of tribalism, thoughts on economics, religion, existentialism, and so on. Most abstract of all (IMO) is how the brain puts everything together to trick us into thinking that we can sense what's going on within other people's minds (empathy, basically, which gives us reasonable educated guesses about how other people are responding to us, while tricking us into thinking that we understand other people far more than we really do). The conscious mind can only make decisions about high-level data that the endless layers of the subconscious prepares for it, like managers presenting their executives with high-level status reports condensed from mountains of low-level data. The quality of the executive's decisions are capped by both the the executive's own rationality, as well as the quality of the condensed data that gets passed up the chain. A real life example is someone who feels threatened when they see someone of another race or religion. Such a person might be being rational in their own way, in that they're making decisions based on what they think are facts about the world and their place in it. But such a person doesn't realize that fear or other human flaws are causing garbage data to propagate up to their conscious mind. A racist's problem, for example, is that they're often just rationally responding to the garbage data that is being given to them by their subconscious. They fear people that look different from them because that's what's in the status reports that their subconscious prepares for them every week, but they haven't figured out yet that their own mind is an unreliable narrator for the world around them. We all are unreliable narrators for ourselves, and there's no way to avoid it- the best we can do is try to understand it and make our best effort to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and rationality about everything. I don't pretend to know anything about any of this stuff on an academic level, this is just a view that I've come around to over the years. I'm just a lifelong armchair philosopher, and this is the best I've been able to come up with so far.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain). You mean your experiences have no real impact. Your thoughts are not necessarily qualia. >Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? Who says your consciousness isn't physical?