prompter: What is explanatory gap? How does it relate to qualia ?

assistant: Explanatory gap is the inability to know what an experience feels like even after knowing all the physical properties that make up that experience.

An example of this is the Mary's room experiment. The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. The thought experiment asks whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she experiences seeing color. If explanatory gap is true then she would gain new knowledge from that experience despite knowing all physical descriptions of color.

This relates to qualia, individual instances of subjective experience, because explanatory gap states that you cannot know that such a subjective experience feels like if you do not experience it yourself.

prompter: Can you list scientists who are sceptical/against the idea of qualia and explanatory gap?

assistant: The explanatory gap refers to the difficulty in explaining the subjective, phenomenal experience of conscious states in terms of the objective, physical processes that occur in the brain. This gap arises from the fact that our current scientific understanding of the brain and nervous system does not fully account for the subjective, first-person experience of consciousness.

The term is often used in discussions of qualia, which are the subjective, first-person experiences of sensations, such as the experience of redness, the taste of sugar, or the sound of a clarinet. The explanatory gap is seen as the difference between our objective understanding of the physical processes that give rise to qualia and our subjective experience of those qualia themselves.

In other words, while we can describe the neural processes that occur when we see the color red, for example, we cannot fully explain why it appears red to us, or what the subjective experience of "redness" actually is. This gap between the physical and the subjective is what is referred to as the explanatory gap. The issue of the explanatory gap continues to be a topic of much debate and speculation in philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology.

prompter: Can you simplify your answer?

assistant: Sure. The explanatory gap is our inability to explain "the hard problem of consciousness". In other words, we can provide explanations for the easy problem, such as how our brains process visual information, but this fails to explain why we have a subjective experience, such as the qualia of redness. Nowhere in the laws of physics can we find the property of the redness. Redness is something only experienced in the mind. How, then, did redness come to exist? We know that redness exists because we can experience it, but how redness exists is a mystery. This is the explanatory gap.

assistant: The explanatory gap is a difficulty in explaining the subjective, first-person experience of conscious states in terms of the objective, physical processes that occur in the brain. It arises from the fact that our current scientific understanding of the brain and nervous system does not fully account for the subjective, first-person experiences of qualia, such as the experience of redness, the taste of sugar, or the sound of a clarinet. The gap between the physical and the subjective is what is referred to as the explanatory gap.

assistant: The explanatory gap refers to the difficulty in explaining our experiences in a way that would convey exactly how we perceive it to another observer.

assistant: The explanatory gap is a philosophical concept that refers to the difficulty in explaining the subjective, qualitative experience of consciousness, also known as qualia. The term was first used by philosopher Joseph Levine in his 1983 paper, "Materialism and Qualia".

The explanatory gap arises because there seems to be a mismatch between our scientific understanding of the brain and our subjective experiences. On the one hand, we have a scientific understanding of how the brain processes information and generates behavior. On the other hand, we have our subjective experiences, such as the feeling of pain or the taste of a chocolate, which cannot be fully explained or predicted by our current scientific understanding.

The gap between these two perspectives is what is referred to as the explanatory gap. The difficulty in explaining qualia or subjective experience through objective, scientific means has been a major source of debate in the field of philosophy of mind and consciousness. Some philosophers argue that the gap is evidence of the existence of non-physical properties, such as the soul or consciousness, while others argue that our current understanding of the brain is limited, and that the gap will eventually be closed through scientific progress.

In conclusion, the explanatory gap is the difficulty in explaining the subjective experience of consciousness through scientific means and it relates to qualia because it refers specifically to the subjective, qualitative aspects of conscious experience that are difficult to explain or predict.

prompter: How does the Mary's room argument relate to qualia?

assistant: Mary's Room is a thought experiment proposed by philosopher Frank Jackson in 1982 that is used to illustrate the problem of qualia. The thought experiment goes like this: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is confined to a black and white room and knows everything there is to know about color, except what it looks like. When she is finally allowed to leave her room and experience color for the first time, she learns something new.

The argument is used to illustrate the idea that subjective experience cannot be fully explained by a scientific understanding of the brain. The argument suggests that, even if Mary knows everything there is to know about color from a scientific perspective, she still has a new experience when she actually sees color for the first time. This suggests that there is something more to experience than what can be explained by science.

In conclusion, the Mary's Room argument is used to illustrate the difficulty in explaining subjective experience or qualia through scientific means. It suggests that subjective experience is something more than what can be explained by our current scientific understanding of the brain.

assistant: Mary is a scientist who exists in a world that she only perceives in black and white.  Mary has plenty of linguistic descriptions of the other colors, but no personal subjective experience, of 'qualia' of them.