If our thoughts are not our own, …?

[Amorphos]

Moreno wrote; As I said, the word experience is tricky. It can mean consciousness/awareness, it can also mean ‘undergoing certain events’. No epiphenomenalist is denying that creatures undergo events and these affect the creatures. What they deny is that the witnessing is in anyway causal.

Well experience and experiencer are quite different, we can indeed place experience within the context of the material world, but not that which experiences it.

epiphenomenalists and often also determinists cite those studies that show that the motor cortex of the brain of people had already decide to move and where to move, before the test subjects were conscious of making a decision. The former use this to show that consciousness is a non-causal result of biophysical processes, the latter use it to show choice is a quale. And of course many of the determinists are also epis.

I think of it that the experiencer [the you sat there utilising its brain/input to think about things right now] is like the captain of a ship. There are many little men running around performing tasks that keep the ship sailing, just as there are many processes in the brain at work at any one time.

The captain [*or user or experiencer, however you want to refer to the you that is thinking [not the you that is personality [Personality is like a set of programs running in the background]] is only a small portion of what’s going on in the brain.
Naturally the brain will attempt to perform its functions and that will include making decisions it deems irrelevant to the captain, like switching an innocuous red or yellow switch. It makes this decision up to six or so seconds before you thought you had made the decision, if it didn’t pre-empt what it thinks you would do [if say you had not noticed], then in nature that amount of time would see you dead, killed by a predator or whathaveyou!

If you are afforded time to consider a decision it will let you make it ~ that’s what informational thought literally is. Equally you* can also make decisions prior to 6 seconds and indeed virtually instantly. When the brain makes decisions its more a backup plan or otherwise secondary.

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