Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. Huxley (1874), who held the view, compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of (...) a locomotive. James (1879), who rejected the view, characterized epiphenomenalists' mental events as not affecting the brain activity that produces them "any more than a shadow reacts upon the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies". (shrink)

Five studies replicate and extend recent experimental findings on a divergence between theoretical and subjectively-experienced decision freedom. While conditions like conflict, uncertainty, or com...

Consciousness as used here, refers to the private, subjective experience of being aware of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories including the intimate experience of a unified self with the capacity to generate and control actions and psychological contents. This compelling, intuitive consciousness-centric account has, and continues to shape folk and scientific accounts of psychology and human behavior. Over the last 30 years, research from the cognitive neurosciences has challenged this intuitive social construct account when providing a neurocognitive architecture for (...) a human psychology. Growing evidence suggests that the executive functions typically attributed to the experience of consciousness are carried out competently, backstage and outside subjective awareness by a myriad of fast, efficient non-conscious brain systems. While it remains unclear how and where the experience of consciousness is generated in the brain, we suggested that the traditional intuitive explanation that consciousness is causally efficacious is wrong-headed when providing a cognitive neuroscientific account of human psychology. Notwithstanding the compelling 1st-person experience that convinces us that subjective awareness is the mental curator of our actions and thoughts, we argue that the best framework for building a scientific account is to be consistent with the biophysical causal dependency of prior neural processes. From a 3rd person perspective,, we propose that subjective awareness lacking causal influence, is than our experience of being aware, our awareness of our psychological content, knowing that we are aware, and the belief that that such experiences are evidence of an agentive capacity shared by others. While the human mind can be described as comprising both conscious and nonconscious aspects, both ultimately depend on neural process in the brain. In arguing for the counter-intuitive epiphenomenal perspective, we suggest that a scientific approach considers all mental aspects of mind including consciousness in terms of their underlying, preceding biological changes, in the realization that most brain processes are not accompanied by any discernible change in subjective awareness. (shrink)

The essay is an attempt to make sense of the apparently special relation between self-knowledge and agency. To achieve that goal, the essay translates the account of what it is like to be a human self offered by Sartre into the language of evolutionary psychology. In L’être et le néant, Sartre describes the phenomenology of the self as a series of inescapable choices in a contingent set of circumstances. This essay identifies Sartre’s description with what Baumeister, Maranges and Sjåstad call (...) a matrix of maybe: the mechanism of nonfactual pragmatic prospection found in humans. Consequently, it defines the self as a matrix of maybe operating within a contingency matrix and reflecting on its own operation. Self-knowledge, the essay concludes, seems special because we routinely and erroneously ascribe to the self features of its contingency matrix. Most of our true first-person claims should not be read as I PREDICATE. Instead, they can be explicated as I have to act in a world where C PREDICATE, where C is the relevant part of the contingency matrix. (shrink)