This much-anticipated book is a detailed elaboration and defense of Levine’s influential claim that there is an “explanatory gap” between the mental and the physical.

In this wide-ranging study, Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on the How does one explain the physical nature of an experience? This puzzle, the "explanatory gap" between mind and body, is the focus of this work by an influential scholar in the field.

" Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...) moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to explain why people become confused by questions about the relation between mental and physical events. When a question leads to confused, inconsistent answers, this may be because the question is ultimately meaningless or at least unanswerable, but it may also be because an adequate answer requires a powerful analytical apparatus. It is the author's view that many important questions about the relation between mind and brain are of that second kind, and that some of the necessary (...) technical and conceptual tools are becoming available as a result of work on the problems of making computer programs behave intelligently. We shall suggest a theory to explain why introspection does not give clear answers to these questions. Technical solutions to the questions will not be attempted, but there is probably some value in finding at least a clear explanation of why we are confused. (shrink)