ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Subjectivity "Demystified": Neurobiology, Evolution, and the Explanatory Gap.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Towards a neuroethological approach to consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Specific mechanisms linking network information processing to the generation of qualia.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Neurobiological emergentism: sentience as an emergent process and the experiential gap.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- From molecule to oblivion: dedicated brain circuitry underlies anesthetic loss of consciousness permitting pain-free surgery.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2023Review
- Animal sentience.Philosophy compass · 2022Article
- TheFrontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- A Traditional Scientific Perspective on the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Debunking a myth: plant consciousness.Protoplasma · 2021Review
- Multiple Routes to Animal Consciousness: Constrained Multiple Realizability Rather Than Modest Identity Theory.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Phenomenal Consciousness and Emergence: Eliminating the Explanatory Gap.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.