Originally posted by Lanny
So the basic challenge is "if physical events are not caused by mental events, how do we explain physical events like talking about mental events". The answer the epiphenomenalist kind of has to give, so far as I can tell, is to say that another physical event is the cause, and the only physical even that makes sense is the same physical event that's causative a given mental event under discussion.
There is no reason to make this absurd distinction of "mental events" and "physical" events, except as mental events being a specific subset of physical events.
You can exert forces upon the world to talk about the ineffability of consciousness, how hard it is to describe it, the meditational experience of disassociating from thought and becoming pure experience, the very notion of epiphenomena whatever.
What else is left? Whatever answer you give me, if you can type it out, it proves my point. You've never once had an experience you couldn't at least bumble around physically about not being able to describe. You haven't even had an experience of an experience like that.
Imagine if you made a robot, maybe with some aspect you don't really understand like a big DNN file to power its functionality. It starts talking about how it can't even begin to describe what it is feeling, but it's feeling it, how at least it cannot doubt the reality of its own experience, how the experience night not cause its behaviour. Meanwhile we are standing there looking at something clearly exerting forces in the world to relate it. At no point should you be tempted to say it's accessing some different domain of existence, or coinciding with it, or anything like that, it's just complex.
The takeaway from that isn't that there must be some correlation between two different kinds of existence but that the very mechanism by which you're aware of anything, is ultimately physical.
The rest of your post is not really any response to my point:
I think the reason it seems like an awkward situation is the assumption that the cause of the physical behaviors involved in discussion must be, in part at least, the subject of that discussion. Concretely, that the mental world must be the cause of discussion of the mental world. But if we really unpack that, I think we can see it need not be the case. I can find myself discussing things which do not exist, rather easily actually, I could have a conversation about James Bond's cuff links, probably in some detail, but James Bond doesn't exist, so his cuff links also do not, thus they can't actually be the cause of any such discussion. The works of Ian Fleming are part of the cause for discussion, but those are clearly distinct from "James Bond's cuff links", so we need not posit any actual cuff links are physically responsible for such a discussion.
Existence et al isn't the problem though.
James Bond's cufflinks don't need to physically exist somewhere in the world for talk and thought about them to be based purely on physical events. The same way a computer can generate, work with, refer to etc a "file" but you can dissect it and there's no "file" anywhere. That doesn't mean the information doesn't exist or that it's non-physical. It exists and it is physical, it's just not an object somewhere.
It is just an abstraction of complex sets of physical events.
Likewise, we need not assert that mental events are the cause for a discussion of mental events. I think it's likely that physical processes that cause our mental lives are likely also the cause of our discussions of our mental lives, which would explain why the physical behaviors we find ourselves engaging in tend to line up with our mental realities. E.g. the reason my saying "I'm feeling anxious" almost always coincides with my have the experience of anxiety is not because the latter causes the former, but that both share a cause in a particular physical state of my brain.
We need not posit that mental events are distinct from physical events at all. I don't know what this "both" is, what remains? I mean even when you typed this, your fingers were very much working in self-reference to something physical. When you don't say something out loud but have the potential to say it yet bite your tongue and hold your hand over your mouth, that's also a physical event. At no point do we need something outside of the physical causal chain, in fact it would be fundamentally wrong.
What you should recognise is a gradual encroachment of the physical facts upon any phenomena you can call "mental". Once you can explain why you are talking about what you are talking about, all that remains is things you think you can't talk about, except even by making that statement you are talking about them.
You used the term "integrated visual experience", "integration" being something of a term of art in neurology, so I just want to clarify that I think the most likely relation between brains and minds is that visual integration is describable in purely physical terms. Perhaps it gives rise to the experience of vision, or perhaps the output of visual integration is further processed somehow to produce experience, but either way we certainly don't need to posit that extracting the shape of some object from visual input happens in the mental realm, and thus discussion of shapes need have causal dependence on any mental object.
P.S. ur mum is a whore
We don't need to posit any kind of mental realm at all, that's the point. Even now when you are discussing mental events, what are you even talking about? You don't need to pull the visual experience out of a "mental realm", it's totally explicable by physical events even if it is really hard to parse out, because you can talk about it.
If we get to the point where whatever your mouth is saying is directly related to what your brain is thinking and it can be explained in physical terms, then you CAN just declare there is something extra missing, that's not falsifiable, but on what basis are you even firing ATPs to make that declaration?
Ps: you got Zok'd and Wires'd nigga
