Is there an explanatory gap such that even perfect knowledge of the physical facts could never be sufficient to predict a persons conscious states?

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Philosophy PY1005, Essay 1                                                November 2011

Is there an ‘explanatory gap’ such that even perfect knowledge of the physical facts could never be sufficient to predict a person’s conscious states? What does your answer imply about the relation between the mind and the physical world?

Chloë Apostolatos
Student ID:  110002817



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Introduction

We neither have the physical measurements nor the verbal articulation to explain a person’s mental states. It seems that we have no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon could be. Many philosophers have tried over the years to solve this mind-body problem, but it seems that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between the physical facts of the world around us, and the mental states of our brain. In this essay, I’m going to argue that there is indeed an explanatory gap, by first explaining what I mean by the term explanatory gap, and then giving several arguments and examples that show we cannot avoid the gap in our physical world.

The ‘explanatory gap’

The “Point of view” of someone’s conscious states

 The possibility of inverted qualia

1.         The ‘explanatory gap’

Human beings are intelligent creatures, who have in time discovered a lot of physical information about the world around us. Using sciences like physics, chemistry and biology; we have been provided with a great deal of information about the world we live in, and also about ourselves and other human beings. However these physical facts never seem to be sufficient enough to have perfect knowledge of our mental states. Knowing a lot about neuroscience gets us quite far, but it seems that there are certain features of our sensations or consciousness that can never be explained in physical terms.  Even if it were possible, to have knowledge of everything physical in the world around us, and know everything about the human brain, thus has perfect knowledge of the physical, it seems that there is something about minds, or the mental, that we cannot explain.

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In this chapter I will try and illustrate what I mean by an explanatory gap, and why I believe there has to be one.

When studying sciences, there’s a lot of different statements we can make about the world, physical statements like these can for example be:

Pain is the firing of C-fibres

Heat is the motion of molecules

Let us suppose both of these statements are necessarily true. They are true in a sense that it is not possible in whatever world for these statements to be false. And now let us imagine a world in which it ...

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