Where does thought come from? was Re: lbo-talk-digest V1 #4706

Ian Murray seamus2001 at home.com
Wed Aug 8 17:47:29 PDT 2001



>
>
> Peter Kosenko wrote:
> >
> > Which, in this line of argument, means that the "higher" has
nothing to contribute to the "lower", because the higher is a mere "epiphenomenon."
> >
> > Peter Kosenko
> >
> >
>
> Huh?
>
> Carrol
======== < http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/ > Epiphenomenalism Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. They are like a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of a locomotive (Huxley, 1874). Mental events do not affect the brain activity that produces them "any more than a shadow reacts upon the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies" (James, 1879).



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