Explaining the Explanatory Gap

Abstract

The main purpose of this text is to present the main problem of consciousness, the so-called explanatory gap problem, and to provide an alternative explanatory approach. The explanatory gap refers to the feeling that something is left out when we explain our mental states with the scientific story of electro-chemical impulses. No matter how sophisticated the scientific story is, the feeling of “how it is like” to be in such and such mental state cannot be encompassed by it, therefore the story leaves something out. We present the traditional understanding of the explanatory gap and show its shortcomings. Then we turn to our proposed strategy which eschews them by understanding the explanatory gap as the result of an intuitive framework. We saw that with the intuition of distinctness we can devise a better understanding of the explanatory gap and at the same time defend physicalism. We then focus on the illustration of the so-called intuitive gap, present the reasons for the existence of the intuition of distinctness and put forward possible explanations for it, all of which are compatible with physicalism.