The Explanatory Gap: 30 Years after

Thirty years ago, in a now classic paper, Joseph Levine (1983), explicitly outlined the difficulties physicalism encounters when confronting the qualitative aspect of mental states. In the present article, I wish to present the main directions materialists took in responding to these difficulties, arguing that the most popular contemporary theories of consciousness avoid confronting directly the “hard problem” of phenomenal experiences (Chalmers, 1995). One possible solution, of course, is to take conscious experience as a fundamental brute fact of the universe we inhabit, but in doing so the boundaries of psychology become ill defined and unclear.