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earthwormchuck163 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?
You can account for a theory where neurons cause consciousness, and where consciousness has no further effects, by drawing a causal graph like
(universe)->(consciousness)
where each bracketed bit is short-hand for a possibly large number of nodes, and likewise the -> is short for a possibly large number of arrows, and then you can certainly trace forward along causal links from "you" to "consciousness", so it's meaningful. And indeed for the same reason that "the ship doesn't disappear when it crosses the horizon" is meaningful.
We reject epiphenomenal theories of consiousness because the causal model without the (consciousness) subgraph is more simpler than the one with it, and we have no evidence for the latter to overcome this prior improbability. This is of course the exact same reason why we accept that the ship still exists after it crosses the horizon.