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Joseph Levine
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Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 14 facts
claimDavid Chalmers, Joseph Levine, and Saul Kripke argue that philosophical zombies are impossible within the bounds of nature but possible within the bounds of logic, implying that facts about experience are not logically entailed by physical facts and that consciousness is irreducible.
quoteJoseph Levine stated: "The explanatory gap argument doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature."
claimJoseph Levine argues that thought experiments demonstrate an explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical world, asserting that even if consciousness is reducible to physical things, it cannot be explained in terms of physical things because the link between them is contingent.
claimJoseph 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.
claimThe philosophical ideas of Thomas Nagel and Joseph Levine are categorized as weaker forms of new mysterianism, which allow for the possibility of future understanding of the mind-body problem.
claimJoseph 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.
perspectiveJoseph Levine contends that full scientific understanding will not close the explanatory gap, and that analogous gaps do not exist for other identities in nature, such as the relationship between water and H2O.
referenceJoseph Levine introduced the concept of the 'explanatory gap' regarding materialism and qualia in his 1983 paper 'Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap'.
claimPhilosophers Joseph Levine, Colin McGinn, and Ned Block, along with cognitive neuroscientists Francisco Varela, Giulio Tononi, and Christof Koch, accept the existence of the hard problem of consciousness.
perspectiveJoseph Levine considers the possibility that the explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical world is merely an epistemological problem for physicalism, rather than evidence that consciousness is non-physical.
claimDavid Papineau, Joseph Levine, and Janet Levine are notable philosophers who subscribe to Type-B Materialism.
claimIn 1983, philosopher Joseph Levine proposed that there is an explanatory gap between the understanding of the physical world and the understanding of consciousness.
referenceJoseph Levine authored 'The Explanatory Gap' in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, published in 2009.
claimJoseph 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.
Hard Problem of Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu 6 facts
referenceJoseph Levine authored 'Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Conscious Experience', published in 2001 by MIT Press.
claimAccording to Joseph Levine, if a scientific deduction of a phenomenon is not possible, it is due to one of three reasons: the laws or mechanisms are not fully specified, the target phenomenon is stochastic in nature, or there are unknown factors involved in determining the phenomenon.
perspectiveJoseph Levine asserts that consciousness presents an explanatory gap because, even with a complete specification of brain mechanisms and physical laws, it remains an open question whether consciousness is present.
quoteJoseph Levine states regarding the third possibility for why a deduction might fail: "precisely an admission that we don’t have an adequate explanation" (2001, 76).
perspectiveJoseph Levine argues that a valid scientific explanation must deductively entail the target phenomenon, meaning one should be able to infer the phenomenon's presence from the stated laws, mechanisms, and initial conditions.
referenceJoseph Levine authored 'On Leaving out what it’s like', published in the 1993 collection 'Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays' edited by M. Davies and G. Humphreys.
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Jun 18, 2004 5 facts
claimJoseph Levine has expressed reluctance to draw anti-physicalist ontological conclusions from the existence of explanatory gaps regarding consciousness.
perspectiveCritics of functionalism, including Ned Block (1980a, 1980b), Joseph Levine (1983), and David Chalmers (1996), argue that consciousness cannot be adequately explained solely in functional terms.
claimJoseph Levine (1983, 1993) and Colin McGinn (1991) argue that brute links, such as nomic connections or well-confirmed correlations, are insufficient to fully explain consciousness because they do not make intelligible why those connections hold.
claimJoseph Levine (1983) argues that the link between experienced red and its neural substrate is unintelligible because the color quale is treated as a simple and sui generis property.
claimJoseph Levine (1983) coined the term 'explanatory gap' to describe the current inability to provide an intelligible link between consciousness and a nonconscious, particularly physical, substrate.
Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 1 fact
claimJoseph Levine (2006) and Uriah Kriegel (2012) argue that no form of higher-order theory has the necessary resources to explain consciousness.
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness - David Chalmers consc.net 1 fact
claimJoseph Levine introduced the term 'explanatory gap' in 1983.
Theories and Methods of Consciousness biomedres.us Jan 29, 2024 1 fact
referenceLevine J published 'Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap' in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in 1983.
A harder problem of consciousness: reflections on a 50-year quest ... frontiersin.org 1 fact
claimJoseph Levine (1983) suggests that the current explanation of qualia may be inadequate or impractical because the physical correlate of the qualia of space might be fundamentally distinct from the subjective experience of extendedness.
The Conscious Mind - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 1 fact
claimJoseph Levine wrote a review titled 'The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory' for the journal Mind in 1998.
Non-physicalist Theories of Consciousness cambridge.org Dec 20, 2023 1 fact
claimJoseph Levine and Galen Strawson have made considerations similar to David Chalmers regarding the inability of standard scientific methods to fully explain consciousness.