Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal Qualia. The Philosophical Quarterly, 32(127), 127. https://doi.org/10.2307/2960077
Summary
In “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” philosopher Frank Jackson argues that consciousness is not physical and does not necessarily have physical effects.
Jackson first discusses several arguments for the existence of qualia with varying polemical utility: the knowledge argument, the modal argument, and the “what it is like to be” argument. He then defends the epiphenomenal position, that qualia do not have causal effects in the physical world, by arguing that instantiation of qualia and physical behavior share an underlying cause.
Atomic notes
Key terms
- Epiphenomenal = a byproduct of a process, rather than a causal influence.
- Physical information = information about the world provided by physical, chemical, and biological sciences; additionally, notions of physical property, process, etc. which are drawn from this information.
- Physicalism = belief that all correct information is physical information.
- Qualia = a mental state that cannot be revealed by physical information and has no effect on the physical world; rather, an epiphenomenal byproduct of other brain activity.
Highlights
Knowledge argument
Example: Fred sees two shades of red imperceptible to most.
H. G. Wells’ story “The Country of the Blind” is about a sighted person in a totally blind community. This person never manages to convince them that he can see, that he has an extra sense. They ridicule this sense as quite inconceivable, and treat his capacity to avoid falling into ditches, to win fights and so on as precisely that capacity and nothing more.
What kind of experience does Fred have when he sees red, and red,? What is the new colour or colours like? We would dearly like to know but do not; and it seems that no amount of physical information about Fred’s brain and optical system tells us.
But we know, we may suppose, everything about Fred’s body, his behaviour and dispositions to behaviour and about his internal physiology, and everything about his history and relation to others that can be given in physical accounts of persons. We have all the physical information. Therefore, knowing all this is not knowing everything about Fred. It follows that Physicalism leaves something out.
To reinforce this conclusion, imagine that as a result of our investigations into the internal workings of Fred we find out how to make everyone’s physiology like Fred’s in the relevant respects … The important point is that such a happening would create enormous interest. People would say, “At last we will know what it is like to see the extra colour, at last we will know how Fred has differed from us in the way he has struggled to tell us about for so long”. Then it cannot be that we knew all along all about Fred. But ex hypothesi we did know all along everything about Fred that features in the physicalist scheme; hence the physicalist scheme leaves something out.
Example: Mary in the black and white room.
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on.
What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.
Conclusion of the argument
The Knowledge argument concludes that physical information is not all the information about the world.
The conclusion in each case is that the qualia are left out of the physicalist story. And the polemical strength of the Knowledge argument is that it is so hard to deny the central claim that one can have all the physical information without having all the information there is to have.
No knowledge of what others know amounts to knowledge of what oneself knows.
Physicalist and qualia freaks alike should acknowledge that no amount of information of whatever kind that others have about Red amounts to knowledge of the second. My complaint though concerned the first and was that the special quality of his experience is certainly a fact about it, and one which Physicalism leaves out because no amount of physical information told us what it is.
If Physicalism were true, we would already know everything that others know.
If Physicalism were true, enough physical information about Fred would obviate any need to extrapolate or to perform special feats of imagination or understanding in order to know all about his special colour experience. The information would already be in our possession. But it clearly isn’t. That was the nub of the argument.
Modal argument
Statement of the argument
By the Modal Argument I mean an argument of the following style. Sceptics about other minds are not making a mistake in deductive logic, whatever else may be wrong with their position. No amount of physical information about another logically entails that he or she is conscious or feels anything at all. Consequently there is a possible world with organisms exactly like us in every physical respect (and remember that includes functional states, physical history, et al.) but which differ from us profoundly in that they have no conscious mental life at all. But then what is it that we have and they lack? Not anything physical ex hypothesi. In all physical regards we and they are exactly alike. ConsequentIy there is more to us than the purely physical. Thus Physicalism is false.
Potential issues with the modal argument
The trouble rather with the Modal argument is that it rests on a disputable modal intuition. Disputable because it is disputed. Some sincerely deny that there can be physical replicas of us in other possible worlds which nevertheless lack consciousness. Moreover, at least one person who once had the intuition now has doubts.
Head-counting may seem a poor approach to a discussion of the Modal argument. But frequently we can do no better when modal intuitions are in question, and remember our initial goal was to find the argument with the greatest polemical utility.
”What it is like to be” argument
Statement of the argument
In “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel argues that no amount of physical information can tell us what it is like to be a bat, and indeed that we, human beings, cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat. His reason is that what this is like can only be understood from a bat’s point of view, which is not our point of view and is not something capturable in physical terms which are essentially terms understandable equally from many points of view.
Comparison with knowledge argument
The Knowledge argument is about properties of someone else’s experience not explained by Physicalism.
It is important to distinguish this argument from the Knowledge argument. When I complained that all the physical knowledge about Fred was not enough to tell us what his special colour experience was like, I was not complaining that we weren’t finding out what it is like to be Fred. I was complaining that there is something about his experience, a property of it, of which we were left ignorant.
Nagel’s argument does not directly object to Physicalism.
Nagel speaks as if the problem he is raising is one of extrapolating from knowledge of one experience to another, of imagining what an unfamiliar experience would be like on the basis of familiar ones. … Nagel argues that the trouble with bats et al. is that they are too unlike us. It is hard to see an objection to Physicalism here. Physicalism makes no special claims about the imaginative or extrapolative powers of human beings, and it is hard to see why it need do so.
The bogey of epiphenomenalism
Two views associated with epiphenomenalism
The existence of qualia does not affect the physical world.
The first is that mental states are inefficacious with respect to the physical world. All I will be concerned to defend is that it is possible to hold that certain properties of certain mental states, namely those I’ve called qualia, are such that their possession or absence makes no difference to the physical world.
The instantiation of qualia makes a difference to what happens in the brain.
The second is that the mental is totally causally inefficacious. For all I will say it may be that you have to hold that the instantiation of qualia makes a difference to other mental states though not to anything physical. Indeed general considerations to do with how you could come to be aware of the instantiation of qualia suggest such a position.
The instantiation of qualia does not have a causal effect on actions.
No matter how often B follows A, and no matter how initially obvious the causality of the connection seems, the hypothesis that A causes B can be overturned by an over-arching theory which shows the two as distinct effects of a common underlying causal process.
Response to the evolutionary objection
Epiphenomena qualia are totally irrelevant to survival. At no stage of our evolution did natural selection favour those who could make sense of how they are caused and the laws governing them, or in fact why they exist at all. And that is why we can’t.
But consider the antecedent probability that everything in the Universe be of a kind that is relevant in some way or other to the survival of homo sapiens. It is very low surely. But then one must admit that it is very likely that there is a part of the whole scheme of things, maybe a big part, which no amount of evolution will ever bring us near to knowledge about or understanding. For the simple reason that such knowledge and understanding is irrelevant to survival.