# Epiphenomenalism, the Problem with Property Dualism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxzSyLAj3NI *Recorded: 2012* James Carroll critiques David Chalmers's property dualism as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers proposes that experience is a fundamental feature of the world requiring new psychophysical laws beyond physics, but Carroll argues this view is fatally epiphenomenal—the experiences it describes cannot causally influence our claims, beliefs, or memories about having experiences. Since what we report experiencing must involve physical processes like moving neurons, any "experience" that doesn't causally connect to behavior isn't the experience we actually care about explaining. Carroll concludes that while property dualism cannot be disproven, it's irrelevant to questions about AI consciousness, animal welfare, and mind uploading. ## Transcript WEBVTT 00:00:22.760 --> 00:01:18.020 Uh next we have James Carroll, epiphenomenalism, the problem with Property dualism. James has a PhD in computer science and a minor in ancient Near Eastern history. He taught institute for several years. And as a graduate student, taught Pearl of Great Price, Isaiah, and the Book of Mormon part-time in the BYU Ancient Scripture Department. He is currently serving a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory, doing ensemble machine learning research and computer-assisted radiographic analysis for nuclear stockpile stewardship. His interests involve artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, linguistics, epistemology, consciousness, comparative ritual and ritual practice. A current list of his publications is available on his website, and you can see that in the program. Thanks. James? 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:46.020 Thank you. My topic is philosophical. and it has to do with consciousness, and it has a whole bunch of background to it. And the challenge is going to be to present that background in the time allotted. Those of you who’ve been following Brent and my arguments on the mailing list will know Something about what I’m about to talk about. 00:01:47.220 --> 00:02:41.600 So, what is it that you experience? I want you to all look at this red strawberry and think for a minute. What do you see when you see a red strawberry? How about when you touch someone’s hand? What do you feel? What do you taste when you taste salt? It was Brother Packer’s famous analogy. What is it like to taste salt? What is it like to smell a rose, to hear a symphony, or to feel the extreme pain of an injury, or the extreme pleasure of human intimacy? These things, sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, pain, pleasure, and many others constitute what it’s like to be you. To point to borrow the famous phrase, there must be something it is like to have these experiences. And where do they come from and what are their nature? Now that’s one of the hardest questions in all of philosophy. theology, artificial intelligence, computer science, this is the hard problem to figure out where these things come from. 00:02:41.680 --> 00:03:37.900 And to explain maybe why it’s so hard Well, first, there are several theories about this, right? There’s a typical spiritualist theory that says that light hits your eyes, there’s a perception process, there’s some preprocessing that goes on. This is the subconscious preprocessing, you know, the edge detection and all this other stuff that happens in V1 through V8 or whatever that is in the visual cortex. And then somehow that gets passed to the conscious you, right? And the conscious you then experiences that. And so the spiritual idea is the conscious you is some spirit that lives over here. The black arrows are causal. Natural laws, and the red arrows are supernatural laws, or that operate in the supernatural. And this is one theory, right, of how this works. And so the processing gets handed to your spirit. Your spirit has the experience. Your spirit then affects the processing. And therefore, the spirit affects the behavior. 00:03:38.459 --> 00:04:41.020 Of course, then there’s the materialist view. Oh, and as a side note for the Mormons in the audience, of course, if you believe Joseph Smith that spirit is just matter, then of course the red arrows become black arrows and there’s no such thing as the supernatural. But we’re just giving you some of the theories that are out here. Then we have this version, which is the one Daniel Dennett and others subscribe to. This says everything is just causal, and all we deal with is causal connections. This part over here Is simply the subconscious processing. This part here is just the conscious processing, and one leads to experience and the other doesn’t. But both lead to behavior. The problem with those two theories is one makes you believe in the supernatural, the other makes you believe that cause and effect alone can create experience. And that’s kind of strange. It feels to me like there’s something more than cause and effect going on when I see a red strawberry. I mean, it just feels that way. So, is there some sort of a third option or a middle road we can take? And one possible middle road is called 00:04:39.320 --> 00:05:38.180 Well, here’s why we need a middle road. Physical theories are ultimately specified in terms of structure and dynamics. They’re cast in terms of basic physical structures. You know, like a molecule and its position, its rotation, its position in Hilbert space, if I’m in quantum mechanics. or phase space, if I’m in more classical mechanics. And there’s everything that describes the object. That’s its structure. And its dynamics is the function. The matrix, if you’re in quantum mechanics, that you multiply by the vector to get the next vector. And this is how things evolve through time, right? So I have structure, my vector, and then I have the evolution of the vector, a function that operates on the vector, structure and dynamics. And principles specifying how the structure changes over time, that’s our dynamics. So if I were to do this mathematically, I have a state at a certain time. I have, and that’s the structure, and then I have the function that operates on that state. That’s the dynamics that gives me the next state, or the state at the next time period. Structure dynamics. 00:05:38.680 --> 00:06:45.639 Structure and dynamics at low level can combine in all sorts of interesting ways to explain the structure and function or dynamics of high level systems. But still, structure and function only ever adds up to more structure and function. So, in other words, this is the pressure times the volume is a constant. This is structure and dynamics at a high level. And it’s this can produce that. In other words, the structure dynamics of every molecule add up to more structure and dynamics. The structure and dynamics of at a low level, of all the molecules interacting in a gas. together adds up to more structure and dynamics, Boyle’s Law, right? And we call that reductionism. I can reduce Boyle’s law to a simpler, more fundamental set of structure and dynamics. And the question is, can qualia, qualia is just a fancy name for subjective experience, can my experience of red be explained reductionist in a reductionist manner by the fundamental forces of nature, cause and effect. In most domains, this, structure dynamics, is quite enough, as we have seen As structure and function are all that needs to be explained. 00:06:45.720 --> 00:07:53.520 Now, this is David Chalmer’s claims. He claims that when it comes to consciousness, something other than structure and function needs to be accounted for. That’s actually the question. Is there something more that needs to be accounted for? To get to that something more that he claims has to be there, an explanation needs a further ingredient. We’re forced to the conclusion that the further question will arise Any account of physical processing. Why is there structure and function accompanied by conscious experience? To answer this question, we need to supplement our story about structure and function with something else. And in doing so, we move beyond truly reductionist explanations. So he says we need something more than a reductionist explanation to explain consciousness. That’s his claim. Whatever account for and I told you it’s intuitive, right? That’s how I feel. It feels like there’s something more. Whatever account for processing we give, the vital step, the step where we move from facts about structure and function to facts about experience, will always be an extra step. requiring something substantial, some substantial principle to bridge the gap. To justify this step, we need a new component to our theories. So what extra element let’s skip to this one. 00:07:53.680 --> 00:09:00.860 What extra element does he propose? And hopefully, these slides will be online. You can read the rest of his comments later. But this is what he proposes as an extra step. We’ll take experience itself to be a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience. Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A non-reductive theory of experience will add new principles to the fundamental feature to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explained familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities. we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and their entities. In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how the experience depends on physiolog Physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws are already form a closed system. Now, by the way. 00:09:02.200 --> 00:10:01.040 It’s unfortunate to me that he explains this in terms of English instead of math. It’s really hard to figure out exactly what he’s talking about. But we’re going to read what he says, and then we’re going to try to see if we understand what he means by formalizing it. So let’s see if we can make sense of all these words. In a minute. Rather, he says they will be a supplement to the physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that physi experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that the dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a non-reductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge. This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates some basic principles over and above those invoked by physics, but it’s an innocent version. Because it’s compatible with laws of nature, and so it’s natural. So here’s the idea. 00:10:01.360 --> 00:10:45.880 It’s not reductive, but instead he postulates a new function. A new function of the state leads to experience. And so it’s unfortunate he didn’t explain this in terms of math, but I think this is what he says. A new function of experience, a new function of the state gives us experience. It’s like this. States evolve, but each state leads to experience. So you can think of our experience like this. Perception, you see the red strawberry, that changes some source in your brain, whether that’s some matter or some. processing unit. That leads to experience and behavior. It leads to behavior through causal laws, but it leads to experience through these new laws he’s proposing, this new function. The problem is this is epiphenomenal. 00:10:46.200 --> 00:12:36.959 Uh what epiphenomenal means is The experience doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change your behavior. It doesn’t matter in terms of behavior is the problem. And so what does that mean? Why does that matter? Well, it matters because What we claim, what are our experiences? Our experiences really are what we claim we experience, what we believe we experience, and what we remember having experienced. But we know several things. My claim of experience involves moving molecules in the air, does it not? What I believe I experience involves and we can actually do brain scans and determine what you believe from the brain scan. So it involves moving Neurons in my brain. And what I remember, same thing, involves moving neurons in the brain. So if experience is as David Chalmers claims, the problem is it doesn’t Lead to claims, it doesn’t lead to beliefs, and it doesn’t lead to memories. And what that means is the experience I claim to have, the experience I believe I have, and the experience I remember having. Is not the experience that David Chalmers is describing. So, although I can’t prove that his extra function doesn’t exist, if it does, it’s not the experience I want to explain. And therefore, property dualism, as expressed by Chalmers, whether we have a different version or not, property dualism as expressed by Chalmers may exist, but I don’t care. In other words, I may have this thing that if I hurt my hip, that’s accompanied by intense epiphenomenal pleasure. But I’m still going to say ow, I’m still going to believe it hurts, and I’m still going to remember that it hurts. And so that epiphenomenal experience, if it exists, is unimportant, and I don’t care about it. So all this really means is that I can throw this one out. 00:12:37.279 --> 00:13:26.420 But it doesn’t mean that I’ve solved the problem. And of course we care, because all sorts of things in computer science depend on answering this question, right? I care about the experience of conscious creatures, do I not? Which means that’s where my morality comes from, which means if I want to make decisions about how I treat animals, how I treat an artificial intelligence, whether I can be uploaded, As has just been claimed, whether that upload will have the same experience as me depends on answering this question correctly. And so I can at least throw out one of them. We still have a long way to go to answer it. But it’s important that we get this right. And so it’s important that we can at least throw out one of these answers, explanations. And I hope to see all of you who voted on on Canonizer, will now abandon the property dualism camp because it’s clearly incorrect. Thank you. 00:13:33.660 --> 00:13:35.339 We have time for one question. 00:13:38.779 --> 00:13:49.800 Well, uh so if I understand it right, you throw away the possibility in the middle and you leave open only the one on the left and the one on the right. Um Which one do you prefer? 00:13:51.880 --> 00:14:38.380 So I’ve thrown out one, there’s two left, is what you’re saying. No, by the way, these two are examples. There’s a lot left. There’s a lot more than three. There’s thousands of these, and so I gave two examples. I’m a materialist. Yeah, so I prefer the one on the right. And and believe believe it or not, that has nothing to do with whether I believe in Mormon concepts of the Spirit, because, as we said, Joseph claims That there is no immaterial matter, there are no supernatural laws, and so I’m you know, the one on the right can be the right one whether or not you believe in a spirit The one on the left is intended to be different because it proposes supernatural laws. And I don’t believe in supernatural laws. So I happen to believe in the one on the right, but I think that that’s compatible with a lot of variants of spiritualism, etc.