Thanks for the valuable comment. I had to look up epiphenomenalism. I found this: Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. Huxley (1874), who held the view, compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of a locomotive. James (1879), who rejected the view, characterized epiphenomenalists’ mental events as not affecting the brain activity that produces them “any more than a shadow reacts upon the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies”.

I’m with James on this one, as well as David Gerlertner. Gerlertner’s book Tides of Mind is very interesting and like many others today rejects what Karl Popper called “promissory materialism” — the idea that if we wait long enough physicalistic science will provide the mechanism that explains everything about the mind/brain issue. The other aspects of consciousness that I have not yet published in this series as explicated in Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism have convinced me that the promise of materialism/physicalism when it comes to explaining the mind and consciousness will never be fulfilled.