Free Will & Empirical Arguments for Epiphenomenalism

Abstract

While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In fact, if we examine popular philosophical accounts of free will, we find, for the most part, nothing to suggest that free will is inconsistent with the presence of unconscious neural precursors to choices. It is only if we adopt highly nonnaturalistic assumptions about the mind (e.g. if we embrace Cartesian dualism and locate free choice in the non-physical realm) that it seems plausible to suppose that the neuroscientific data generates a threat to free will.

Different aspects of consciousness explained by distinct biophysical processes.

“…Soon et al's (2008) showed that prefrontal and parietal cortex activity might encode the result of decisions made even 10 s earlier before becoming conscious of them. Recently, Elzein (2020) posited once again the epiphenomenal character of consciousness.…”

From Neuroscience to Law: Bridging the Gap

“…It should be clear that just pointing to some neuroscientific data is not evidence of these neural correlates being the source of, or even relevant to, a given mental or behavioral phenomenon: we already know that brain-functioning is necessary for all mental and behavioral phenomena, and to assume otherwise would amount to committing a dualistic fallacy -the fallacy, in this case, of inferring the irrelevance of psychological notions on the sole basis of pointing to their neural correlates (cf. Pernu, 2011;Elzein, 2019). So, simply noting that there are some (homogeneous) neural correlates of the ways of behaving we deem immoral or illegal should not make one think that those correlates are causing that sort of behavior [cf.…”