Arguing about consciousness: A blind alley and a red herring

Abstract

O'Brien & Opie hold that phenomenal experience should be identified with “stable patterns of activation” across the brain's neural networks, and that this proposal has the potential for closing the ‘explanatory gap' between mental states and brain processes. I argue that they have too much respect for the conceivability argument and that their proposal already does much to close the explanatory gap, but that a “perspicuous nexus” can in principle never be achieved.