You may be right—that is it may be possible to bridge the gap between explanations in the conceptual paradigm of physical causes and conditions, and explanations in the conceptual paradigm of cognitions, reasons, aspirations, inspirations, insights and desires.

Unfortunately, I lack the background in the kinds of disciplines you mentioned that would enable me to assess whether there has been or is likely to be any success in this enterprise.

So, I look to a simpler way of dissolving a conundrum which I see as arising our of what is for anyone lacking the fluency in the afore-mentioned disciples, an insoluble conceptual incompatibility.

So. I am not arguing that the physical is nothing but the mental or that the mental is nothing but the physical, but that these are two paradigmatic ways of describing and explaining the one thing, and that they are conceptually incommensurable (for most of us if not all of us).

Yes, but the explanation is partly "why do some things experience and not others?" So is the dual aspect supposed to hold for everything? For instance, there would be some sort of phenomena awareness for orange juice in a blender, a corpse, or water in a river?

If everything has this dual aspect, then there is still a question of why certain interactions give rise to certain experiences. There would be the question of why we have a phenomenal horizon at all, since everything experiences and there is constant interaction and a constant exchange of information, matter, energy, and causation across any boundary drawn up to demarcate a person. Presumably anesthetic would work by splitting the unified mind into a jumble of isolated minds? It doesn't seem like it can be turning off the universal dual aspect.

Whereas if everything doesn't have experiences then the gap is still there — there is still the question: why does the living body have this dual aspect but not the corpse?

For instance, there would be some sort of phenomena awareness for orange juice in a blender, a corpse, or water in a river? — Count Timothy von Icarus

But we know what living organisms have that these things lack. An active semiotic modelling relation with world based on an encoding mechanism like, principally, a hierarchy of genes, neurons, words and numbers in the case of us socially-constructed humans.

This is the central fact you fail to engage with – the way that life and mind are indeed mechanistic. A system of informational switches regulating entropic flows in the way anyone can recognise as being alive and mindful. Or in other words, constituting an organism.

But continue to talk past the epistemic cut that is what bridges the so-called explanatory gap...

but that these are two paradigmatic ways of describing and explaining the one thing, and that they are conceptually incommensurable — Janus

Describing vs explaining is a good way of putting it. The would-be phenomenologist says I can describe, and you can't explain.

But my first psychophysics lecture flipped that one on its head. The professor explained Mach bands as a neural contrast enhancing and boundary making mechanism in the visual pathway. I walked out into the bright sunlight and looked up at the sharp edges of the tall buildings against the sky and for the first time noticed that these illusory contours were indeed right there.

So explanation led to the description – the phenomenal experience. It showed that the causal gap had its proper bridge.

You just have to stick with it and bring the whole general show across with you. Arrive at a general explanation that grounds all such specific explanations. Develop a model of biosemiosis, the modelling relation, epistemic cut, Bayesian mechanics, or whatever it gets called.

This is the central fact you fail to engage with – the way that life and mind are indeed mechanistic. A system of informational switches regulating entropic flows in the way anyone can recognise as being alive and mindful. Or in other words, constituting an organism zombie. — apokrisis

But we know what living organisms have that these things lack. An active semiotic modelling relation with world based on an encoding mechanism like, principally, a hierarchy of genes, neurons, words and numbers in the case of us socially-constructed humans. — apokrisis

These particular things do in fact make up the end result of "consciousness" but do not define themselves as the bare minimums to achieve such. Granted, based on that which is currently evidenced or "observable" with our consciousness would suggest ours is unique. But this, though reasonable and socially-acceptable, is not any argument-ending contention when it comes to philosophical inquiry.

I don't even think most anti-realists believe the position themselves, even if they think they do, since they generally end up pointing to some standards as the benchmark of the good. Even pronouncements about how such anti-realism can enhance freedom or "fight fascism," presume that freedom is good and fascism is not. And indeed, they often make this the standard that justifies everything else. So, I don't even see myself as that far from them in the end. I too put a premium on freedom, I just think they badly misunderstand its essence by only considering it terms of potency/power. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are positions that purport to go beyond the realism-anti-realism binary. I’m thinking of poststructuralists
like Deleuze, Focault, Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that of course there are standards of right and wrong, true and false. These are like the banks of the river , which maintain their stable shape against the changing flow of the river. But they point out that the bank eventually erodes and changes, just like the river itself, but much more gradually. Perhaps the changes in the bank are so incremental that we don’t notice them, ignoring the drift of sense over time of our formulations of moral goodness. What allows societies to function is not an unchanging foundational basis of the good, but shared intelligibilities and values within a contingent culture. One could say that mutual intelligibility is a foundational good , but the substantive content on which that intelligibility is based is contingent and relative.

Todd May is among those who claim that such thinking sneaks in ethical grounds through the back door:

What I would like to argue here is that despite themselves, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard predicate much of their political work on several intertwined and not very controversial ethical principles. The mistake, made by Deleuze and Foucault in avoiding ethical principles altogether and by Lyotard in trying to avoid universalizing them, is that their avoidance is itself an ethically
motivated one. In the conversation cited above, where Deleuze praises Foucault for being the one “to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others,” he is laying out a principle of behavior that it would be unimaginable to assume he does not think ought to bind the behavior of others. In resisting an essentialism about human nature, there may
have been a resistance to telling people not only what they want but also what they ought to want.

Where they must form an ethical commitment, and this is a commitment in keeping with poststructuralist political theory, is at the level of practice. Some practices are acceptable, some unacceptable.” “…claims to ethical truth can be seen as no more problematic than factual claims to truth, claims made in the cognitive genre.” Ethical claims also possess a universal character. Claims that one ought to perform action X in circumstances C, or that killing is wrong, or that it is ethically praiseworthy to help those who are oppressed by one’s own government are not made relative to a cultural context… It is precisely because ethical claims mean what they seem to mean that they are universal; and if they are true, they are binding upon everyone.” The difficulty attaching to ethical discourse derives from the difficulty, given the possibility both of competing values and principles and competing descriptions of the circumstances one finds oneself in, of articulating a correct ethical position. Were ethics to be situation-specific, there would be no such thing as ethics,
because there would be no generalization.”

What May and other critics don’t appreciate is that criteria of acceptability are contingent products of differential relations within a community. The challenge for Deleuze and Foucault isn’t to determine what constitutes an acceptable ethical content but to avoid getting trapped by any qualitatively contentful ethical principle.
“…what is at issue here is not how to promote the correct arrangements but how to assess whether an arrangement or practice, once promoted, is indeed active or reactive. In other words, the question is not one of how to achieve a goal, but one of deciding which goals are to be achieved.”

The ethical question for poststructutalistsm is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how we manage to think beyond justice understood as singular traditions of the good, so that we can focus on enriching our traditions with alternative intelligibilities, thereby expanding the inclusiveness of our relational structures.

I don't think that will help, because I can't see how saying the Universe has an overarching purpose makes any sense at all without positing a purposer. I will go further; I think saying that anything has a purpose presupposes either that it has been designed for some purpose or that it is in some sense and to some degree a self-governing agent. — Janus

Hey, I'll be maybe a little blunt.

As often happens in this place, lots of opining on what is the case which purports itself as rational demonstration of what is affirmed. All fine and dandy. But I notice that nothing in your reply evidences the logical impossibility you so far assert – and logical impossibility is not a matter of mere opinion last I checked. At least not in realms of philosophy.

To help things out, for your claim to hold any water, either demonstrate how any of the premises I’ve provided are necessarily false and hence not feasible to use or else rationally demonstrate how the premises I’ve provided can only result in the logical impossibility you so far yet claim. Without this, no logical impossibility is evidenced – and you remain wrong in your affirmation by default.

Also, so we don't equivocate on the matter of what "purpose" means, purpose here is intended as "The end for which something is done, is made or exists." (reference) Do you hold something else in mind by the word?

In something like Neo-Platonism, then, the universe can be said to exists both because of and for the Good, where the Good / the One is the ultimate end, the ultimate end for which the universe exists - and, here, the universe is thereby purposeful, i.e. serves a purpose/end (note that the One is nevertheless not a purposer, not even an agent). And, tmk, no one has been able to evidence Neo-Platonism logically impossible to date.

You’ve made a rather strong claim in saying that purpose sans purposer is logically impossible. So the impetus is now on you to rationally substantiate this claim by evidencing the logic necessary for obtaining this conclusion.

The explanatory gap is a problem for contemporary science and the way it has defined what a proper explanations must look like. I do not think it's a particularly important thing to solve in order to buy into (or reject) Hegel's philosophy of history, politics, concept development, etc. Ultimately, his project is to wrap the subjective and objective in a third category that includes both, since both must be real in some important respect. This project is accomplished (or fails) upstream of considerations of some objective explanation of the emergence of Giest in Nature, at least at the level of scientific modeling.

Hegel certainly has something to say about mechanistic accounts along the lines of Newton's, which only result in predictive models and cannot explain their own necessity— so in some ways he is offering a critique of some types of scientific explanation that could be relevant to the "explanatory gap." I think changes in the philosophy of physics have perhaps made Hegel's critique a bit less relevant, although it certainly holds for some sorts of explanation.

— Apokrisis

As with a tornado, half the job of being alive and mindful is done.

:chin: Is there half of an intentional act? Tornadoes have no internal means of continuing to exist, which organisms do.

Actually, there’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you (in particular). I was exploring the idea that a characteristic of classical physics was that it is indifferent to context. It concentrates on ideal objects - objects which have precisely measurable attributes, without taking into account environmental disturbances or other circumstances which are ‘less than ideal’. Because of this abstraction, it’s reckonings are universal - they apply to any ideal object anywhere in the universe. But, the point which forced itself on science with the advent of quantum physics, was that context actually meant something. Why? Because the outcome of the experiement depends on the way it is set up - set it up one way, the result is a wave, set it up another way, the result is a particle. So context begins to matter. And this becomes evident also in environmental science and systems science generally, because ‘the environment’ is a context. And it seems to me that is a major shift that has occured in 20th century science.

That’s all I wanted to ask.