Conscious experience, reduction and identity: many explanatory gaps, one solution

Abstract

This paper considers the so‐called explanatory gap between brain activity and conscious experience. A number of different, though closely related, explanatory gaps are distinguished and a monistic account of conscious experience, a version of Herbert Feigl's “dual‐access theory,” is advocated as a solution to the problems they are taken to pose for physicalist accounts of mind. Although dual‐access theory is a version of the mind‐body identity thesis, it in no way “eliminates” conscious experience; rather, it provides a parsimonious and explanatorily fruitful theory of the consciousness‐body relation which faithfully preserves the nature of conscious experience while going quite far in “bridging” the various explanatory gaps distinguished below.