epiphenomenalists

Epiphenomenalism is a philosophical view in the philosophy of mind. It is a form of emergentism which holds that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but that mental events have no causal efficacy themselves. In other words, mental states are byproducts of physical processes, like the whistle of a steam engine is a byproduct of its mechanical workings. While the whistle is a real phenomenon, it does not, in turn, affect the engine's operation.

This means that while our thoughts, feelings, and consciousness exist, they do not play any role in causing our actions or any other physical events. If epiphenomenalism is true, then when we feel pain and subsequently withdraw our hand from a hot object, it is the physical processes in the brain that cause the hand withdrawal, not the feeling of pain itself. The feeling of pain is simply an effect of those physical processes.

Epiphenomenalism is often contrasted with interactionism, which proposes that mental events can causally influence physical events, and physical events can causally influence mental events. It is also distinct from dualism, which asserts that mind and body are fundamentally different substances, though epiphenomenalism is a type of property dualism where the mental properties are distinct from physical properties but are dependent on them. A key challenge for epiphenomenalism is explaining why we have subjective experiences or qualia if they have no causal impact on our behavior.