Justification not yet generated — showing supporting facts

• William James questioned why specific conscious states, such as pain and pleasure, evolved as by-products of specific physical states rather than others, such as why pain evolved with harmful processes like burning and pleasure with beneficial processes like eating.
• The zombie hypothesis claims that it is imaginable and possible for a body to exist without any associated conscious states, which would show that conscious states are something over and above physical states.
• Joseph Levine proposes a thought experiment involving an alien species that lacks c-fibers to demonstrate that the absence of a specific physical state (c-fiber firing) does not logically entail the absence of a conscious state (pain), leaving the question of whether the aliens feel pain open.
• Most philosophers find overdetermination dualism implausible because it is inexplicable why conscious states would systematically and without exception cause the exact same effects as the physical states they are correlated with, as there is no reason to expect psychophysical laws to mirror physical laws in this way.
• The explanatory argument posits that one cannot simply assume that conscious states are constituted by physical states; it must be demonstrated that they are.
• Joseph Levine uses the example of pain and its reduction to the firing of c-fibers to illustrate the difficulty of mapping conscious states to physical states, noting that in other scientific fields like chemistry and physics, connections between levels of description are necessary rather than contingent.
• Overdetermination dualism posits that psychophysical laws operate in both directions: physical states produce conscious states, and conscious states produce physical effects such as behavior.
• David Chalmers posits that the concept of information may provide a framework for progress in consciousness studies because it captures a formal isomorphism between conscious states and underlying physical states.
• Chalmers and McQueen propose that conscious states cause the collapse of physical states in the brain, and these states do not necessarily have to be measurements.
• Physicalism must posit specific psychophysical constitution relations where pain is constituted by avoidance-causing physical states and pleasure is constituted by attraction-causing physical states to explain fitting correlations between conscious states and physical behavior.
• Joseph Levine disputes that conscious states are reducible to neuronal or brain states, arguing that the bridges between conscious states and physical states are contingent rather than necessary.