What does Epiphenomenal mean?
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.
What is an example of epiphenomenon?
In the more general use of the word, a causal relationship between the phenomena is implied; the epiphenomenon is a consequence of the primary phenomenon. For example, having an increased risk of breast cancer concurrent with taking an antibiotic is an epiphenomenon.
What is a synonym for an epiphenomenon?
n. •Other relevant words: (noun) byproduct, outlier, by-product.
Is consciousness an epiphenomenon?
However, for others, consciousness is an epiphenomenon, that is, something without a direct function, like the redness of blood – a characteristic which was not selected for, but was a consequence of the mechanism selected to deliver oxygen. It is the neural structures underlying conscious experience that are causal.
Is the mind Epiphenomenal?
Epiphenomenalism is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that physical and biochemical events within the human body (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions, for example) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition).
What is another word for byproduct?
In this page you can discover 11 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and related words for byproduct, like: outgrowth, derivation, offshoot, kin, spin-off, bi-product, derivative, descendant, spinoff, and by-product.
Is qualia an Epiphenomenal?
The epiphenomenalist holds that qualia fall into the latter category. They are a by-product of certain brain processes that are highly conducive to survival.
What does Jackson mean when he claims that qualia are Epiphenomenal?
Jackson argues that qualia are epiphenomenal; i.e., they don’t cause anything physical (he allows that they might cause other mental events) and furthermore, that “their possession or absence makes no difference to the physical world.”
Is epiphenomenalism a physicalist?
So physicalist epiphenom- enalism is the conjunction of physicalism-i.e., the doctrine that tokens of mental events are tokens of physical events-and type epiphenomenalism. Classic epiphenomenalism, on the other hand, robs mental events of any causal powers whatsoever.
Is epiphenomenalism physical?
Is consciousness an epiphenomenon of brain processes?
Materialist-Reductionists have long argued that consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of brain processes. It “kind-of” evolved quite by accident as a part of natural selection. This has always puzzled me.
What is the meaning of epiphenomenon?
Definition of epiphenomenon. : a secondary phenomenon accompanying another and caused by it specifically : a secondary mental phenomenon that is caused by and accompanies a physical phenomenon but has no causal influence itself.
What is the epiphenomenalist view of mental events?
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”.
What is the difference between epiphenomenalism and destructive psychology?
The argument that is given to support the destructive claims is that (i) knowledge of one’s mental events requires that these events cause one’s knowledge, but (ii) epiphenomenalism denies physical effects of mental events.