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GuySrinivasan comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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I'm not convinced I'm keeping my levels of reference straight, but if I can knowingly consistently accurately talk about epiphenomena, doesn't the structure or contents of the uncausing stuff cause me to think in this way rather than that way? I'm not sure how to formalize this intuition to tell if it's useful or trivial.
That's the point, I believe. To call something 'real', and yet say in principle it couldn't affect us causally, is to contradict yourself. If you're contained in a set of nodes that are causally linked, then that is your reality. Any other sets of nodes that can't contact you just don't matter. Even if there was, say, a causal structure beside our universe, of puppies and kittens running around, it wouldn't matter in the slightest, if in principle we could never interact with them. If we could deduce from the laws of physics that they had to exist, then we would be causally linked. The point I am (and perhaps Eliezer is) trying to emphasise is that our reality is everything that can, and does, affect us.
Um...
-.-
Try reading this charitably as expressing confusion about how we can (knowingly, consistently) talk about epiphenomena, since they (obviously, duh) don't cause us to think in this way rather than that way.
It seems to me that the structure of your epiphenomenal model causes you to think about it in the same way that the structure of arithmetic "causes" you to think about arithmetic. So you can infer the existence of an epiphenomenal self as a sort of Platonic form. If you take modal realism seriously, maybe you should infer the "existence" of the epiphenomenal self.
Then it's not uncausing. It has caused you to think in this way rather than that way.