Abstract
The Hard Problem is surrounded by a vast literature, to which it is increasingly hard to contribute to in any meaningful way. Accordingly, the strategy here is not to offer any new metaphysical or ‘in principle’ arguments in favour of the success of materialism, but to assume a Type Q(uinian) approach and look to contemporary consciousness science to see how the concept of consciousness fares there, and what kind of explanations we can hope to offer of it. It is suggested that while they will be materialist explanations, they will not be of the form that many scientists and philosophers would have us believe, but instead prompt a very different set of expectations and research projects.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors for organising this special issue, and to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Thanks also to Dave Chalmers, and many ANU graduate students, for helping me think about these issues again.
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Irvine, E. Explaining What?. Topoi 36, 95–106 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9273-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9273-4