.: Jaegwon Kim’s Epiphenomenalism?

Thursday, 1 October 2020

Jaegwon Kim’s Epiphenomenalism?

A Short

How do we solve the problem of epiphenomenalism? (This is a position summed up well in this way: “Subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body yet themselves have no causal efficacy on physical events”.)

Here’s one possible way offered by the Korean-American philosopher Jaegwon Kim.

Kim argues that “we should not think of the relation of neural events to their supervening mental events as causal”. Moreover,

“supervening mental events have no causal status apart from their supervenience on neurophysiological events that have ‘a more direct causal role’”.

This means that this isn’t a case of a mental event at time t causing a neurophysiological event at time t 1. No: if a mental event (M) supervenes on a neurophysiological event (N), then both the mental event and the neurophysiological event occur at one and the same time. So we can’t say that mental event M causes neural event N if they occur at one and the same time.

This is like the H₂0-water case.

That is, we don’t first have a set of H₂0 molecules which cause water. When we have a set of H₂0 molecules, we also have water. H₂0 molecules, then, don’t bring about (or cause) water. H₂0 molecules constitute (or are identical to) water.

On Jaegwon Kim’s account, we both can and cannot say that mental events are epiphenomenal. We can say that they’re epiphenomenal in that if mental event M occurs at one and the same time as N, then it can’t be epiphenomenal. More accurately, if M “inherits the causal power” of N (or if it “rides piggy back” on N), then it both has causal power and is not epiphenomenal. On the other hand, if M is indeed riding pigging back on N, then we can see it as being epiphenomenal. But, again, if M and N occur at one and the same time and are intimately connected, and if M also inherits the causal power of N, then in what sense is M truly epiphenomenal? (Perhaps this is simply a matter of taste or grammar.)

But if we tie M and N so closely together, aren’t we also saying (or implying) that M literally is N (as already hinted at with the H₂0-water example)? That is, that M and N are identical? Again, as with the epiphenomenal nature of M, both yes and no. From the outside, all we have is N and human behaviour. However, ontologically (or from the inside), M is clearly not identical to N. Again, from the first-person (or subjective) point of view, M is not a physical event. From the third-person point of view, on the other hand, M doesn’t factor at all except in terms of behaviour and “verbal reports”. M alone is also (according to the American philosopher Donald Davidson) incapable of falling under any natural laws.