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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The explanatory gap problem is dissolved if the conscious qualitative property and the neural property are identical.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Identity statements between phenomenal and neural properties require justification, and 'type-B' physicalists like Levine argue the conceivability of zombies shows the identity is not knowable a priori.
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    • 2.If the identity itself is a brute, unexplained posit, the explanatory gap is merely relocated to why this particular identity holds rather than dissolved.
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    • 3.An explanatory gap that is simply declared closed by fiat rather than illuminated by the identity leaves the hard problem structurally intact, as Chalmers argues the conceivability of distinct realizers persists.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Kripke's modal argument establishes that if pain and C-fiber firing are genuinely identical, the identity is necessary, yet we can coherently conceive of pain without C-fiber firing, unlike paradigm theoretical identities like water and H2O.
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    • 2.The appearance of contingency in phenomenal-neural identities cannot be explained away by appealing to the reference-fixing of phenomenal terms, since phenomenal properties are directly acquainted rather than picked out via description.
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    • 3.Therefore the identity either fails or remains metaphysically unintelligible in a way that heat-kinetic energy identities do not, meaning the explanatory gap re-emerges at the modal level.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.If the conscious qualitative property and the neural property are identical, then the neural property does not cause or give rise to the conscious qualitative property — it simply is the conscious qualitative property.
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    • 2.If there is no causal relation between the neural property and the conscious qualitative property, there is no gap to bridge and no further explanation is needed.
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    • 3.Identities cannot be explained, since nothing is identical with anything but itself, and it makes no sense to ask why something is identical with itself.
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