EPIPHENOMENALISM MAKES US ASK DOES THE BODY MOVE THE MIND NOT VICE VERSA?

Think about something called epiphe-nomenalism. According to that much detested idea, there are no mental or spiritual or disembodied thoughts and abilities involved in what we do or in what we are. What happens is the brain and the body are totally subject to unchosen physical causes. They do something and then there is a mental response in you. The clockwork moves. Then you get a thought for example. So instead of what is in your mind causing you to do x or y, physical causes that are not affected by any mental or psychosocial or spiritual events put mental events in you.

Nothing can refute this doctrine. It cannot be disproven.

You sit down to think about something. Thoughts come into your head as if involuntary. You may search for a thought that does not come. Your answers find you. You do not find them. You work hard at the terrible algebra homework and an hour later the answer comes to you as if unbidden. It is as if it sprang into your consciousness from some computer or machine. So it is not without support from your experience. 

A computer or a ghost or energy field might function like a mind. But no matter how much it is like a mind it is not a mind. In theory there could be human beings that seem to have minds and in fact do not. What do you say to, “I have an instinct that tells me who to consider a person and who not to. All you are doing is the same thing and saying you apply it to all people”? Nothing. What can you say. Telling them not to think that way is telling them they have committed a thought crime and asserting authority over them. But that is dehumanising them to an extent and making them inferior to you. The fact is that if somebody thinks that way you create a culture that degrades them. Serial killers who attack people who they objectify as prey for they are “non-people” or even “semi-people” or “pseudo-people”. A serial killer does not appear in a vacuum and society’s lies and corruption play a role in his or her thinking.

We all know thoughts seem to just arrive.  You may want a thought but you don't really consent to it for you don't know what it is going to be.  Uniformed consent is not consent.  It is just a reaction.  Where do they come from? God? Some part of your brain that acts as if it were just a calculator moved from your desk and planted in there? Satan?

If religion could get people to imagine God is doing the thinking for them like that or Satan you can imagine the harm that will ensue.  At least if you think they come from your own unknown and unconscious levels that keeps some perspective on it.  God and Satan put you on the slippery slope.  We might be stuck on that slope but the fanatic who is about to shoot you at the mall is not and may think the thought to kill is a sign from God, and the divine seal of approval!