The explanatory gap

“The elephant in the mirror: bridging the brain’s explanatory gap of consciousness”

“The explanatory gap. consciousness is a mystery. no one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states (nagel 1974, levine 1983). suppose that consciousness is … n”

“Philosophers have reacted in different ways to the apparent explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness. some deny that any explanatory gap exists at all. some hold that there is an explanatory gap for now, but that it will eventually be closed. some hold that the explanatory gap corresponds to an ontological gap in nature. this chapter explores another reaction to the explanatory gap those who react in this way agree that there is an explanatory gap, but they hold that it stems from the way we think about consciousness. in particular, this view locates the gap in the relationship between our concepts of physical processes and our concepts of consciousness, rather than in the relationship between physical processes and consciousness themselves.”

“How is life related to the mind? the question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that evan thompson explores in mind in life.thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, continental phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. where there is life, thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. this synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make mind in life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume the embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience (coauthored with eleanor rosch and francisco varela). endlessly interesting and accessible, mind in life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.”

“Much work in contemporary philosophy of mind and neurophilosophy hinges on the concept of ‘representation,’ but that concept inherits a problematic ambiguity from neuroscience, where scientists may distinguish between cognitive and physiological levels of representation only tacitly. first, i explicate two potentially distinct senses of representation corresponding to these levels. i then argue that ambiguity about the nature of representation in philosophy of mind is problematic for at least one prominent philosophical project that aims to use neuroscientific work on representation to defend the existence or explanatory relevance of intentional mental states, namely schroeder’s (2004) scientific explication of desire in terms of the neurobiology of reward. i argue that philosophical treatments of the relationship between cognitive and neural architecture must attend more carefully to the ambiguity in the concept of representation. i conclude by outlining a strategy for addressing the gap between levels of representation, one that privileges a local or narrow philosophical approach to interpreting scientific concepts and data over a global or general approach.”

“Our evolved cognitive architecture includes a range of conceptual frameworks, or ‘stances’, we can take to objects in the world. the ‘physical stance’ underlies our capacity to understand things in causal-mechanistic terms. the ‘intentional stance’ underlies our capacity to understand things in terms of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes. the ‘phenomenal stance’, which we introduce here, underlies our capacity to understand things as seats of phenomenal consciousness and, correlatively, as moral patients. drawing on recent work in social neuroscience, we argue that the intuition of an ‘explanatory gap’ between the physical and the phenomenal stems from the neurofunctional rivalry between the physical and phenomenal stances.”

“Taylor’s article represents an intriguing attempt to relate the properties of the nervous system to pe through neural network modeling. the strength of this paper is its attempt to make neural net models closely resemble the brain. the main weakness is not unique to this particular theory, and seems to be a problem for neural network theories of consciousness in general. even a neural network that accurately portrays many properties of a brain might inadvertently leave out the very properties that result in pe. furthermore, taylor does not adequately address the cognitive neuropsychology data that he cites in support of his theory. he needs to make explicit the theory’s assumptions and better integrate the theory with existing literature incognitive neuroscience. despite taylor’s assault, the explanatory gap remains alive and well.”

“Neuroscientists and philosophers nowadays claim that the problem of phenomenal consciousness is a scientific problem. increasing knowledge of the neural correlates of consciousness is expected to yield an explanation of consciousness in neuroscientific terms. on the other hand, it is sometimes argued that even complete knowledge of brain function will leave unanswered the question of why cerebral processes are accompanied by consciousness at all. proponents of this view assume an unbridgeable ‘explanatory gap’ between the brain and the whole realm of phenomenal consciousness. here, it is argued that this ‘explanatory gap’ problem can not adequately be met by current neuroscientific approaches to consciousness, while purely philosophical approaches remain controversial because they inevitably reach a level of contradictory intuitions that do not seem to be resolvable by further argument. however, the problem may be resolved once one accepts that the features of consciousness itself might change with our judgments and descriptions of consciousness inspired by neuroscience. such a ‘change of consciousness’ becomes realistic when consciousness is construed as a description-dependent, ‘non-intrinsic’ property. hence, it is argued that neuroscientists are right not to try to refute the explanatory gap argument, but that they should continue research on the neural correlates of consciousness, thus preparing new descriptions of phenomenal consciousness.”

“It is widely agreed among contemporary philosophers of mind that science leaves us with an ‘explanatory gap’ – that even after we know everything that science can tell us about the conscious mind and the brain, their relationship still remains mysterious. i argue that this agreed view is quite mistaken. the feeling of a ‘explanatory gap’ arises only because we cannot stop ourselves thinking about the mind–brain relation in a dualist way”

“The thesis that there is a troublesome explanatory gapnbetween the phenomenal aspects of experiences and thenunderlying physical and functional states is given a numbernof different interpretations. it is shown that, on each ofnthese interpretations, the thesis is false. in supposingnotherwise, philosophers have fallen prey to a cognitivenillusion, induced largely by a failure to recognize thenspecial character of phenomenal concepts.”