communal decision-making. The activation of certain brain regions associated with consciousness when eating food can be seen as evidence for this contribution of social factors to the evolution of consciousness. Likewise, the facial expression associated with disgust and bitter food also suggests this link. Therefore, it would be evolutionarily advantageous to favour conscious thought and perhaps this bias could be given by dualist intuitions. These dualist intuitions have been overcome, the explanatory gap vanishes. There is no reason why the firing of certain neurones results in the experience of the colour red because – to borrow an example from Papineau – the firing of those neurons is the experience of the colour red. This identity is comparable with the fact that H 2 O is water, something which everyone can understand. If it were the case that materialism was not preferable to dualism, then the gap would remain as it depends on the existence of another dimension of consciousness, which, if it existed, should not be explainable through the examination of the physical structure of the brain. I will therefore attempt to offer evidence in support of materialism in order to add strength to my claim that the explanatory gap is non- existent. Firstly, materialism is far more likely than the presence of another aspect to the mind and is better able to explain the presence of consciousness in other animals which appear to exhibit signs such as a sense of self, as shown by the mirror test in which an animal is placed in front of a mirror with paint on its forehead; those animals that investigate this on their own heads are said to have some form of consciousness. If you approach this from a dualist perspective, then you would find it difficult to explain how consciousness arises in other creatures but not to the same Removing the gap Why Materialism?
and left the question of why they cause conscious thought unanswered.
Dualist intuitions
Unfortunately this explanatory gap seems intuitively correct, why should, for example, neuronal oscillations trigger conscious thought, this intuition is evidenced in PapineauÊs what exactly is the explanatory gap, when he examines both the difficulties with accepting the truth of a statement such as c- neurons firing= pain and the ease with which we accept the possibility of a zombie. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that these intuitions are not evidence in support of dualism; they merely represent a bias towards a certain viewpoint of the kind that has historically held back the progress of science. For example, the intuition that the world is flat is seemingly logical but nevertheless false, similarly we have an intuitive tendency to disbelieve quantum theory, that the universe is innately random and that no event is certain until it had been observed, indeed it is seemingly consciousness itself that causes the collapse of the wave function, causing Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, to comment that consciousness is the real problem that needs explanation. This dualist institution is likely to be the product of a number of factors, from a dualist upbringing to the way in which our brains process information to the visualization of the colour red when an experience of it is recounted, but not when the firing of neurons in the visual cortex is described. I would also like to propose my only hypothesis not explored by Papineau, that this dualist intuition gives strength to conscious thought. This would be evolutionarily advantageous as consciousness has been linked with social interaction, most importantly, our ability to empathize with others. This ability historically conferred an advantage because it prevented animals from eating food which resulted in the sickness of others and allowed better for materialists
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