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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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Some thoughts about "epiphenomena" in general, though not related to consciousness.
Suppose there are only finitely many events in the entire history of the universe (or multiverse), so that the universe can be represented by a finite casual graph. If it is an acrylic graph (no causal cycles), then there must be some nodes which are effects but not causes, that is, they are epiphenomena. But then why not posit a smaller graph with the epiphenomenal nodes removed, since they don't do anything? And then that reduced graph is also finite, and also has epiphenomenal nodes.... so why not remove those?
So, is the conclusion that the best model of the universe is a strictly infinite graph, with no epiphenomenal nodes that can be removed e.g. no future big crunches or other singularities? This seems like a dubious piece of armchair cosmology.
Or are there cases where the larger finite graph (with the epiphenomenal nodes) is strictly simpler as a theory than the reduced graph (with the epiphenomena removed), so that Occam's razor tells us to believe in the larger graph? But then Occam's razor is justifying a belief in epiphenomena, which sounds rather odd when put like that!
The last nodes are never observed by anyone, but they descend from the same physics, the same F(physics), that have previously been pinned down, or so I assume. You can thus meaningfully talk about them for the same reason you can meaningfully talk about a spaceship going over the cosmological horizon. What we're trying to avoid is SNEEZE_VARs or lower qualia where there's no way that the hypothesis-making agent could ever have observed, inducted, and pinned down the causal mechanism - where there's no way a correspondence between map and territory could possibly be maintained.