Subjectivity "Demystified": Neurobiology, Evolution, and the Explanatory Gap.

Consciousness cannot be explained solely by physics, chemistry, and biology, creating an "explanatory gap" between the physical brain and subjective experience. This paper deduces the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identifying vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs as taxa possessing these features. It reconstructs when consciousness first evolved and considers its adaptive value. The authors theorize that consciousness arises from all complex system features of life plus even more complex features of elaborate brains. They argue the explanatory gap persists because it stems from both life and diverse brains, requiring a complex, multifactorial account including consciousness's diversity, personal nature from embodied life, and unique neural features.

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Abstract

While life in general can be explained by the mechanisms of physics, chemistry, and biology, to many scientists and philosophers, it appears that when it comes to explaining consciousness, there is what the philosopher Joseph Levine called an "explanatory gap" between the physical brain and subjective experiences. Here, we deduce the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identify which animal taxa have these features (the vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs), then reconstruct when consciousness first evolved and consider its adaptive value. We theorize that consciousness is based on all the complex system features of life, plus even more complex features of elaborate brains. We argue that the main reason why the explanatory gap between the brain and experience has been so refractory to scientific explanation is that it arises from both life and from varied and diverse brains and brain regions, so bridging the gap requires a complex, multifactorial account that includes the great diversity of consciousness, its personal nature that stems from embodied life, and the special neural features that make consciousness unique in nature.