(January 24, 2023 at 12:25 pm)GrandizerII Wrote:(January 24, 2023 at 11:10 am)emjay Wrote: My zombie-dogs would salivate, yes; I also agree that fear is part of a process, ie conditional on causes and relationships, but just that those causes and relations under epiphenomenalist thinking would be manifested entirely within the physical correlates of consciousness, ie neurons and the brain. Perhaps you could consider them different levels of description; fear is a phenomenal experience, but it's also... or corresponds in some way to... a specific neural state of activity. As does hearing a sound, associating that sound with other neural representations, and triggering other neural events (ie salivating), same for a learned fear response... at either level of description they can be considered the same process, but just with epiphenomenalism asserting that the phenomenal side is causally inert... basically just a representation of the underlying physical processes.
Speaking of classical conditioning (which is what the example above is about), this is a mindset which was commonly employed by behaviorists in the early/mid-20th century (along with operant conditioning). The interesting thing about behaviorism is that it claimed to provide an adequate account for dogs salivating without referring to inner mental/cognitive states and purely to external stimuli and observable behaviors. Clearly that ended up not working.
Now, we see a view similar to behaviorism in which instead of cognitive states/acts not being real or worth considering, we have qualia/phenomenal consciousness that is being questioned.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not trying to describe behaviourism here... I despise behaviourism. That's not what this is about at all for me. Behaviourism would have it that there is no cognition or emotional states involved, just switchboard-like actions and reactions. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that every phenomenally conscious state has a corresponding neural state, or that's the contention anyway, including cognitive and emotional states. The behaviourists thought they could explain everything in terms of the inputs and outputs of the system, ignoring that there were other internal processes going on... ignoring the black box of cognition and emotion and all the rest, as it were... but I'm not ignoring that black box, just saying that whatever goes on within it, has a physical and neural basis. For instance say someone took some time thinking about a course of action. Behaviourism couldn't account for that... there being some variable amount of time between input and output... but a view that recognises those internal cognitive processes, whether it could directly observe them or not, could, at least in theory.
