The Explanatory Gap

Consciousness, Thomas Nagel states, “is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.” Here he refers particularly to phenomenal consciousness, which Block defines as “perceptual experiences,” and Nagel describes as “something that it is to be.’ This experiential element appears to present a challenge to the physicalist assertion that all mental processes are explicable in terms of physical brain states, biochemical reactions and the laws of physics. Frank Jackson presents this argument in his 1982 thesis Epiphenomenal Qualia. Whilst Jackson’s argument occupies a seminal position in philosophy of mind, whether he adds anything new to knowledge of the nature of conscious experience, is debateable. Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to

“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is some-thing it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is expe-rience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream

She argues the reader can conceive of feeling the pain from the pinch while being disembodied and, because conceivability equals possibility, it is possible to feel pain without a physical state. For disembodied pain to be possible, sensations like pain cannot be identical to physical states. Therefore, physicalism must be false. (113) Gertler posits that thought experiments like hers are useful only when the concepts they involve are made clear and unambiguous. Both the concepts of the physical and of pain, she asserts, are not subject to lack of clarity or comprehension. (114) Since we have a “sufficiently comprehensive” understanding of these two central concepts in the thought experiment, the conceivability test provides justification for what is possible. If what we can conceive can be possible, then conceiving of disembodied pain, having satisfactory understanding of what pain means, results in the possibility of disembodied pain.

We all are very familiar with the very perplexing nature of this entity “consciousness”. We can tell when we are awake, when we are thinking, when we are pondering over the world, but to explain this nature of consciousness can be somewhat grueling. However as our understanding and comprehension of the brain is escalating, we are able to tackle this subject to an extent.

Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument” has been heavily critiqued since being published in the 1982 “Epiphenomenal Qualia” article. The argument seeks to refute physicalism using Jackson’s widely known “Mary’s Room” experiment. Many issues arise from the experiment, such as problems with the terms used, as well as questions about whether the premises and conclusion can be held and deductively follow one another. Examining objections to the “knowledge argument” shows how the problems the argument experiences undermines Jackson’s attempt to refute physicalism.

The understanding on the knowledge of other minds has provided a puzzle known as the inverted spectrum. This possibility has emerged as an important challenge to functionalist accounts of qualia. Functionalism is committed to defining mental states in terms of their cause and effects . By identifying sensory events with casual roles, however, functionalism appears to be missing qualitative aspects all together. The topic of spectrum inversion has often been raised as a contradiction to functionalism, as well as other materialist theories about consciousness. These negates to functionalism show that even when all the relevant physical facts are held constant, the facts about qualia can still vary, hence that the phenomenal must be over

As our scientific paradigm has shifted towards a materialist account of the world, many thinkers believe that appeals to the supernatural cannot provide truth. Consequently, beliefs that had once been considered adequate must now be reworked if not torn down entirely to fit this new world view. Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained attempts to provide an account of our internal experience (i.e. Consciousness) that is rooted in the materialist world view. Though he is not the first to undertake this project, he takes issue with what he perceives to be the popular materialist account of consciousness, and seeks promote his own theory. With this essay I aim to offer an informative summary of the book followed by an evaluative dialogue of its central claims.

In the end the countless philosophical theories that have been proposed throughout the ages have been very difficult to confirm. Since the limits of perceptual experience and empirical evidence present much

Another section in this chapter describes how we rarely understand why our unconscious works the way it does. Gladwell illustrates with an example of Ted William, the greatest hitter of all time, when he asked about the secret of his success he answered that he could track the ball right onto the bat. Later on, when he confronted with the fact that human beings cannot track the ball onto the bat. He said, “Well, I guess it just seemed like I could do that”. The author continues with the conclusion that we have the tendency to explain almost everything, even when we do not have real explanation. According to Gladwell, this is known as “storytelling problem”, and therefore we are better off by saying “I do not know” more often.

When pondering consciousness, people commonly distinguish between the physical characteristics of neurons firing signals throughout the body and the mental aspects of how being alive actually feels. Furthermore when studying consciousness, the imposing battle between physicalists, people who believe the physical and mental aspects are the same, and dualists, people who believe the physical and mental are two distinct aspects, brings about controversy. In What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel claims, “it would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false” but then goes on to add, “physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.” Even though the claims appear mutually exclusive and Nagel states that physicalism is incomprehensible, Nagel’s claims are able to be simultaneously true and his conditions for understanding physicalism are improper.

The sceptics challenge revolves around whether we can have knowledge of the external world. The sceptic gives three scenarios where you are deceived; your senses are occasionally deceived for example for objects far in the distance size, dreams can be so realistic that you take them to be fact, and you could be deceived by a evil demon controlling your senses (adapted recently to the brain in a vat argument) and these are phenomenally indistinguishable from real life. The Contextualist responds to the sceptics challenge by saying we can both ‘know a lot’ (Lewis, 1996) and ‘know next to nothing’ (Lewis, 1996). The Contextualist justifies this by saying that we have two forms of

In the essay “Epiphenomenal qualia,” Jackson introduces the mental experience of “qualia” as an objection to physicalism – the idea that all true information is physical information. Beyond this conclusion, Jackson further argues that qualia are epiphenomenal by rebutting three possible responses. I believe that Jackson’s objections are valid but unsound, and that epiphenomenalism of qualia is more plausible than its counterargument. As for the knowledge argument which proves that physicalism is false, I agree with Churchland that it is unjustified, but I concur with Jackson’s conclusion that physicalism is false.

For centuries, inquisitive minds have struggled to comprehend the notion of a non-physical soul. They attempted to explain the soul using tangible, representative parts of the human body. Throughout history, scientists and philosophers have explained the representative theories of mind using a variety of logical and experimental techniques. The logical arguments produced cardiovascular and ventricle theories of the mind, and the experimental techniques led to the encephalic theory of mind and medical practices like phrenology and more recently MRI brain scanning.

explanation of where our minds, or consciousness, came from and how we are able to

First, the neurological explanation of existence is correlated to the learning process. According to some neurologists, the mind is unable to create or imagine any visual or audible sensory without seeing, hearing, toughing, or tasting. Which are all related to the human’s senses. Whether these imagery are obtain by the conscious or the non-conscious mind, they are forms of knowledge.Thus, existence can be correlated to the human’s sense. Meaning, a person must activate one of his or her senses in order to create a neurological pathways, which are then modulated in the form of meaning.Therefor, existence is analytic way of knowledge. However, these forms of information are passive due to its relation to senses. For instance, if two people,fin and Jack, are walking in the opposite direction of each other and Jack is looking at fin. Then, for jack fin exist. On the other hand jack doesn’t exist for fin.