The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[Angrboda]

Let's just say that the part that seems to be a necessary element of catching the ball, subjective awareness of the location of the ball, is absent; yet the lack of an ostensibly necessary part, under the theory that such subjective things are causal -- which is what makes them necessary -- does not prevent the causal chain which results in the appropriate behavior of catching the ball.  If catching a ball requires subjective experience, it apparently doesn't require that subjective experience.  It's hard to argue, given that one can replace that aspect of the behavior, that one couldn't in theory do likewise with all other subjective aspects of the behavior, resulting in the same behavior but without conscious experience or the involvement of awareness.  At the least, it's evidence towards that end.

That would certainly apply if a person catching a ball did so with no sensation or memory of the event. One could catch a ball without subjective awareness, certainly, but the act of catching the ball can’t be anything but a subjective experience: the movement of your arm, the feeling of the ball striking your hand, the weight and texture of the ball - all of these sensations and the subsequent memory of the event qualify it as a subjective experience.

Boru

That's not at issue and is simply a red herring as it isn't required that those subjective elements of catching the ball play a causal role in actually catching the ball, and as such go nowhere in demonstrating that consciousness plays a causal role, which is what is at issue. Like pain, it doesn't appear obvious that the aspects you mention perform a causal role in the behavior. There is nothing about them that is inconsistent with epiphenominalism. Indeed, those elements can be present in cases where no ball was caught.

I'll add a couple of points.

One, if being aware of the properties of an object in our environment is not required for predicting and accurately responding to that information, then it's not clear what, if any, causal role is being posited as belonging to consciousness. In one form or another, if awareness isn't necessary for responding to some information about the environment correctly, then exactly what do non-epiphenomenalists propose consciousness is actually providing?

The second is a caveat to all the foregoing. It occurs to me that most of this is predicated upon the notion that consciousness is both unified and singular in any given brain. Experiments with split-brain patients significantly undermine this assumption in that they suggest that in split-brain patients, there may be multiple centers of the type of cognitions typically associated with consciousness. Under this hypothesis, it's possible that consciousness is aware of the location of the ball in blindsight patients, just not that consciousness, or those parts of it, that are involved in reporting upon one's conscious experience. In some hypotheses, that aspect of consciousness is purely confabulatory. If that is the case, it becomes rather unclear what we actually mean by the term 'consciousness' if we have no reports from the parts of consciousness with causal cognitions and only reports from aspects of consciousness that play no causal role.