Whether Subjectivity Strategy Can Respond to the Challenge of Explanatory Gap to Physicalism

The explanatory gap between material and consciousness is regarded as a great challenge to physicalism. Godfrey Smith tries to respond to this challenge through the evolutionary approach. He argues that the subjective character of phenomenal consciousness derives from the subjective character of living systems and it can explain our intuition about the explanatory gap. This response can be summarized as the “subjectivity strategy”, which is argued in three steps: the first step is to argue that the explanatory gap is compatible with physicalism; the second step is to argue that the subjectivity strategy can explain our intuition about the explanatory gap; and the third step is to argue that the explanation offered by the subjectivity strategy is a kind of physical explanation. However, the third argument is untenable because the evolutionary explanation provided by Godfrey Smith might not be a physical explanation as evolutionism is compatible with dualism. Therefore, the current subjectivity strategy cannot respond to the challenge of explanatory gap to physicalism.