Good point. I edited the post to say “near epiphenomenalism”, because like you said, it doesn’t fit into the strict definition.
If the physical and mental are quantized (and I expect that), then we can’t really speak of “infinitesimal” changes, and the situation is as you described. (But if they are not quantized, then I would insist that it should really count as epiphenomenal, though I know it’s contentious.)
Still, even if it’s only almost epiphenomenal, it feels too absurd to me to accept. In fact you could construct a situation where you create an arbitrarily big mental change (like splitting Jupyter-sized mind in half), by the tiniest possible physical change (like moving one electron by one Planck length). Where would all that mental content “come from”?
In other words, continuous phenomena can naturally lead to discontinuous phenomena. At the top of that curve, moving the ball by one Planck length causes an infinite divergence in where it ends up. So where does that infinite divergence “come from”, and could the same answer apply to your brain example?
Here, to have that discontinuity between input and output (start and end position), we need some mechanism between them—the system of ball, hill, and their dynamics. What’s worse it needs to evolve for infinite time (otherwise the end still continuously depends on start position).
So I would say, this discontinuous jump “comes from” this system’s (infinite) evolution.
It seems to me, that to have discontinuity between physical and mental, you would also need some new mechanism between them to produce the jump.
we need some mechanism between them—the system of ball, hill, and their dynamics.
A brain seems to be full of suitable mechanisms? e.g. while we don’t have a good model yet for exactly how our mind is produced by individual neurons, we do know that neurons exhibit thresholding behavior (‘firing’) - remove atoms one at a time and usually nothing significant will happen, until suddenly you’ve removed the exact number that one neuron no longer fires, and in theory you can get arbitrarily large differences in what happens next.
I thought about it some more, and now I think you may be right. I made an oversimplification when I implicitly assumed that a moment of experience corresponds to a physical state in some point in time. In reality, a moment of experience seems to span some duration of physical time. For example, events that happen within 100ms, are experienced as simultaneous.
This gives some time for the physical system to implement these discontinuities (if some critical threshold was passed).
But if this criticality happens, it should be detectable with brain imaging. So now it becomes an empirical question, that we can test.
I still doubt the formulation in IIT, that predicts discontinious jumps in experience, regardless of whether some discontinuity physically happens or not.
(BTW, there is a hypothetical mechanism that may implement this jump, proposed by Andres Gomez Emilsson—topological bifurcation.)
Hm, yeah, the smallest relevant physical difference may actually be one neuron firing, not one moved atom.
What I meant by between them, was that there would need to be some third substrate that is neither physical nor mental, and produces this jump. That’s because in that situation discontinuity is between start and end position, so those positions are analogous to physical and mental state.
Any brain mechanism, is still part of the physical. It’s true that there are some critical behaviors in the brain (similar to balls rolling down that hill). But the result of this criticality is still a physical state. So we cannot use a critical physical mechanism, to explain the discontinuity between physical and mental.
Good point. I edited the post to say “near epiphenomenalism”, because like you said, it doesn’t fit into the strict definition.
If the physical and mental are quantized (and I expect that), then we can’t really speak of “infinitesimal” changes, and the situation is as you described. (But if they are not quantized, then I would insist that it should really count as epiphenomenal, though I know it’s contentious.)
Still, even if it’s only almost epiphenomenal, it feels too absurd to me to accept. In fact you could construct a situation where you create an arbitrarily big mental change (like splitting Jupyter-sized mind in half), by the tiniest possible physical change (like moving one electron by one Planck length). Where would all that mental content “come from”?
A ball sitting on this surface:
has a direction of travel given by this:
In other words, continuous phenomena can naturally lead to discontinuous phenomena. At the top of that curve, moving the ball by one Planck length causes an infinite divergence in where it ends up. So where does that infinite divergence “come from”, and could the same answer apply to your brain example?
Here, to have that discontinuity between input and output (start and end position), we need some mechanism between them—the system of ball, hill, and their dynamics. What’s worse it needs to evolve for infinite time (otherwise the end still continuously depends on start position).
So I would say, this discontinuous jump “comes from” this system’s (infinite) evolution.
It seems to me, that to have discontinuity between physical and mental, you would also need some new mechanism between them to produce the jump.
A brain seems to be full of suitable mechanisms? e.g. while we don’t have a good model yet for exactly how our mind is produced by individual neurons, we do know that neurons exhibit thresholding behavior (‘firing’) - remove atoms one at a time and usually nothing significant will happen, until suddenly you’ve removed the exact number that one neuron no longer fires, and in theory you can get arbitrarily large differences in what happens next.
I thought about it some more, and now I think you may be right. I made an oversimplification when I implicitly assumed that a moment of experience corresponds to a physical state in some point in time. In reality, a moment of experience seems to span some duration of physical time. For example, events that happen within 100ms, are experienced as simultaneous.
This gives some time for the physical system to implement these discontinuities (if some critical threshold was passed).
But if this criticality happens, it should be detectable with brain imaging. So now it becomes an empirical question, that we can test.
I still doubt the formulation in IIT, that predicts discontinious jumps in experience, regardless of whether some discontinuity physically happens or not.
(BTW, there is a hypothetical mechanism that may implement this jump, proposed by Andres Gomez Emilsson—topological bifurcation.)
Hm, yeah, the smallest relevant physical difference may actually be one neuron firing, not one moved atom.
What I meant by between them, was that there would need to be some third substrate that is neither physical nor mental, and produces this jump. That’s because in that situation discontinuity is between start and end position, so those positions are analogous to physical and mental state.
Any brain mechanism, is still part of the physical. It’s true that there are some critical behaviors in the brain (similar to balls rolling down that hill). But the result of this criticality is still a physical state. So we cannot use a critical physical mechanism, to explain the discontinuity between physical and mental.