Realizing Imperfection

             Everything we perceive to be reality is physical and within the barriers of the physical realm, therefore, everything is explainable or describable and governed by physical laws. In the past, humans have been able to answer questions and solve problems that once appeared to be unexplainable such as gravity or the earth revolving around the sun. These once considered "brute facts" now have explanations to accompany them and should not be taken for granted as "that is just the way it is." However, humans must accept that they cannot conjure explanations for everything. In this paper, I will utilize the strategy taken by a non-reductive mechanical physicalist to support the claim that the existing explanatory gap can never be closed.
             The explanatory gap is theorized to exist because phenomenal states are perspectival yet brain states are not, but we seem to not be able to explain how nonperspectival items in dull gray matter can realize perspectival items. Between the two, there appears to be an enormous gap, this is the problem of mechanism. However, if it is realized that phenomenal states are both perspectivaly subjective and physical, then it is demanded as to how these phenomenal perspective states are generated by objective physical ones.
             The view of non-reductive mechanical physicalism is that phenomenal states are perceptively subjective, physical states that are realized through the objective, lower-level physical states, through a mechanism that interprets their generation. However, it is currently not known what or where in the brain this mechanism could be. There are two variations of this claim. The pessimistic view believes in the existence of a mechanism inside the brain that closes the explanatory gap, but we will never understand how this mechanism is able to generate phenomenally consciousness states from objective brain states because it is beyond human limitations. The other more o...

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Realizing Imperfection. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 15:22, May 19, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/74571.html