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drnickbone comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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You have it the wrong way around. In epiphenomenalism, brain states cause qualia, qualia don't cause brain states. When my brain was in a particular past state, the computation of that state produced qualia and also recorded information of having been in that state; and recalling that memory, by emulating the past state, sensibly also produces qualia which are similar to the past state. I can't know for sure that the memory of the experience I have now accurately matches the experience I actually had, of course... but then that problem is hardly unique to epiphenomenalist theories, or even particularly implied by the epiphenomenalist theory.
In general, most of the questions in your comment are valid, but they're general arguments for solipsism or extreme skepticism, not arguments against epiphenomenalism in particular. (And the answer to them is that "consistency is a simpler explanation than some people being p-zombies and some not, or people being p-zombies at certain points of time and not at other points")
The question was rhetorical of course... the point is that if your qualia truly are epiphenomenal, then there is no way you can remember having had them. So you're left with an extremely weak inductive argument from just one data point, basically "my brain states are creating qualia right now, so I'll infer that they always created the same qualia in the past, and that similar brain states in other people are creating similar qualia". It doesn't take extreme skepticism to suspect there is a problem with that argument.
Still seems like Occam's Razor would rule against past versions of me and all versions of other people--all of which seem to behave like I do, for the reasons I do--doing so without the qualia I have.
I don't see how this follows. Or rather, I don't see how "if qualia are epiphenomenal, there is no way you can remember having had them" is any more or less true than "there is no way you can remember having had qualia, period".
So you reject this schema: "I can remember X only if X is a cause of my memories"? Interesting.
After pondering both Eliezer's post and your comments for a while, I concluded that you were right, and that my previous belief in epiphenomenalism was incoherent and confused. I have now renounced it, for which I thank you both.
Hmm. I tried to write a response, but then I noticed that I was confused. Let me think about that for a while.
Lots of memories are constructed and modified post hoc, sometimes confabulating about events that you cannot have witnessed, or that cannot have formed memories from. (Two famous examples: Memory of seeing both twin towers collapse one after the next as it happened (when it fact the latter was shown only after a large gap), memory of being born / being in the womb.)
I'm not positing that you can have causeless memories, but there is a large swath of evidence indicating that the causal experience does not have to match your memory of it.
As a thought experiment, imagine implanted memories. They do have a cause, but certainly their content need not mirror the causal event.
Well, you really wouldn't be able to remember qualia, but you'd be able to recall brain states that evoke the same qualia as the original events they recorded. In that sense, "to remember" means your brain enters states that are in some way similar to those of the moments of experience (and, in a world where qualia exist, these remembering-brain-states evoke qualia accordingly). So, although I still agree with other arguments agains epiphenomenalism, I don't think this one refutes it.
I have, on occasion, read really good books. As I read the descriptions of certain scenes, I imagined them occurring. I remember some of those scenes.
The scene, as I remembered it, is not a cause of my memory because the scene as I remember it did not occur. The memory was, rather, caused by a pattern of ink on paper. But I remember the scene, not the pattern of ink.
Well presumably the X here for you Is "my imagining a scene from the book" and that act of imagination was the cause of your memory. So I'm not sure it counts as a counter-example, though if you'd somehow forgotten it was a fictional scene, and became convinced it really happened, then it could be argued as a counter-example.
I said "Interesting" in response to Kaj, because I'd also started to think of scenarios based on mis-remembering or false memory syndrome, or even dream memories. I'm not sure these examples of false memory help the epiphenomenalist much...