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Epiphenomenalism

In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism holds that while mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, those mental events can have no causal effects on anything physical - including events in the brain. Behaviors, such as coordinated muscular contractions for movement, are caused by nerve impulses generated by automatic input from other neurons or from processed information from sensory organs, while the mental event - consciousness of will to move - emerges after the physical action and thus does not cause it.

Epiphenomenalism, as pioneered in the nineteenth century by Thomas Huxley and others, became the basis in the twentieth century for behaviorism. As opposed to substance dualism, subjective states of mind or perception (such as qualia) can be ignored in favor of completely physical mechanistic explanations of behavior.

There are several significant arguments against epiphenomenalism, perhaps the strongest of which is an appeal to natural selection. In this argument a property can only be selected for if it has an effect upon an organism's behavior. Thus consciousness - including qualia and intentional states - must have effects on behavior.

Web Resources On Epiphenomenalism

Epiphenomenalism in SEP
Philosophy of Mind: Epiphenomenalism
Epiphenomenalism in Wikipedia

Book Resources On Epiphenomenalism

About Behaviorism by B.F. Skinner
Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology by John Heil, ed.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper

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