A widely held view claims that phenomenal experience cannot be explained by neural mechanisms due to an incompatibility between phenomenal and neuroscientific knowledge. This paper argues against that view in three steps. First, it shows that two key assumptions behind the explanatory gap argument are unfounded, making the problem solvable with standard scientific methods. Second, it hypothesizes that affective pain can be captured in functional terms if the function is cognitive rather than behavioral: feeling affective pain is feeling an urge to avoid. Third, it presents empirical evidence supporting this claim and shows how the functional description helps identify neural mechanisms underlying affective pain. This serves as a proof of principle that phenomenal experience can be explained in objective neuroscientific terms.
Many philosophers claim that the subjective character of conscious experience creates a fundamental deficit in third-person (extrospective) access to first-person experience. This paper argues that extrospective measurement methods suffer from no such deficit when compared with measurement techniques in the natural sciences. After rejecting principled objections, a historical comparison shows extrospective methods are still in an early stage of development but can be improved via a bootstrapping strategy similar to that used in physical measurement. Multiple sources of evidence should allow substantial advances. New developments in pain measurement demonstrate this bootstrapping strategy is already bearing fruit.