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moridinamael comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong
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Koan 2:
"Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness - that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn't affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness has always been that we can imagine a universe in which all the atoms are in the same place and people behave exactly the same way, but there's nobody home - no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. The usual effect of the brain generating consciousness is missing, but consciousness doesn't cause anything else in turn - it's just a passive awareness - and so from the outside the universe looks the same. Now, I'm not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false - rather, I want to know if you think they're impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules."
How would you reply?
Impossible, no; meaningless, yes.
Consciousness in reality causes us to emit sentences about an awareness of subjective experience, so there is a coupling between neurons and the conscious algorithm being run by those neurons.
If consciousness were merely a passive awareness with no causal influence upon anything else in reality, it would not be causally entangled with the universe. This is as close to "meaningless" as I can imagine.