fferent, property dualists can claim that consciousness can only be reduced to low-level phenomenal properties which must be accepted as fundamental (in need of no further explanation). Scientific reduction is hard because one cannot just appeal to new fundamental laws in explaining consciousness. Although Chalmers' theory is appealing because it provides an alternative to the difficult task of reduction, the fatal flaw that dissuades most philosophers from adopting property dualism is epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism is the view that consciousness is not causally responsible for any of our actions/behavior. Most people know that the pain one has when one puts one's hand in a fire is the cause of one's withdrawing that hand with haste. Even if this is not thought of as the only cause, it must at least be one of the causes. In effect, we believe that our phenomenal experiences of the world make a difference in our behavior. If the fire did not hurt, why would we pull our hand away? Chalmers acknowledges that this is a problem for his theory, and tries to downplay its significance. At one point he claims that "any view that takes consciousness seriously will at least have to face up to a limited form of epiphenomenalism" (Chalmers 158). Chalmers' theory leads to epiphenomenalism because of these two claims: (1) consciousness is only naturally supervenient on the physical, and (2) the physical realm is causally closed (i.e., only physical phenomena can cause other physical phenomena). These two views imply that subtracting consciousness from the world would not affect any of the causal relations within the world, so any phenomenon would have a causal explanation which make no reference to the existence of consciousness. Hence, it seems that consciousness does no causal work in bringing about what happens in our world. There are ways Chalmers could avoid such a conclusion such as adopting a Humean view of causation. If causation merely co...
