Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind and Explanatory Gap Essay

Submitted By breannap1992
Words: 465
Pages: 2

Consciousness: Qualia … and the Explanatory Gap

My name is Breanna an today I will argue Consciousness: Qualia … and the Explanatory Gap.
I will argue that there is no explanatory gap.
The explanatory gap doesn’t exist as it undermines physicalism because in reality there is no gap and the gap that exists in the explanations of consciousness is just a conception and not an extension of the mind.
Firstly the explanatory gap is a term used by philosophers that human experiences cannot be fully explained by mechanical process and how they give rise to the way we feel things when we experience them.
Although we may feel as though we can experience everything the explanatory gap is just a mechanical process into how and what we can feel once they have been experienced. An example of this could be pain, everyone experiences it but cannot be measurable as at that point no one knows what type of pain it is or the extent of it.
The gap doesn’t demonstrate a gap in nature but a gap in our understanding of nature. Of course a plausible explanation for there being a gap in our understanding of nature is that there is a genuine gap in nature. But so long as we have countervailing reasons for doubting the latter, we have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the former.
Although there may be no gap can we ever experience everything there is to experience?

Thomas Nagle expressed one of the most famous examples of the explanatory gap in ‘what’s it like to be a bat?’ Although we can study the bats characteristics, sounds, behaviours and sensors bats may have we will never physically and mentally know what it’s actually like to be a bat. Some of our own