ABSTRACT
Materialists take the things close to our hearts, such as consciousness, intelligence, and beauty, and make them byproducts or epiphenomena of our material constitutions. And how could they do otherwise given their assumption that materialism is true? Yet materialism’s truth is itself in question. Consequently, a leitmotif throughout this book has been that epiphenomena are reciprocal in the sense that if one thing is epiphenomenal on (or a byproduct of ) another, then the other can just as well be epiphenomenal on it. Materialism makes nonmaterial things material. But nonmaterialism can likewise make material things nonmaterial. e logic of epiphenomena works in both directions. us, earlier, we saw that matter could just as well be a byproduct of information, in contrast to the conventional materialist approach, which treats information as a byproduct of matter.
