A plank across the explanatory gap: The case of pain.
Consciousness and cognition July 1, 2025 Michael Pauen
A widely held view claims that phenomenal experience cannot be explained by neural mechanisms due to an incompatibility between phenomenal and neuroscientific knowledge. This paper argues against that view in three steps. First, it shows that two key assumptions behind the explanatory gap argument are unfounded, making the problem solvable with standard scientific methods. Second, it hypothesizes that affective pain can be captured in functional terms if the function is cognitive rather than behavioral: feeling affective pain is feeling an urge to avoid. Third, it presents empirical evidence supporting this claim and shows how the functional description helps identify neural mechanisms underlying affective pain. This serves as a proof of principle that phenomenal experience can be explained in objective neuroscientific terms.