The Explanatory Gap: Consciousness, Integration, and the Question Physics Cannot Answer

Abstract

This work examines the three most developed contemporary answers to the hard problem of consciousness — functionalism, Integrated Information Theory, and panpsychism — and argues that each fails to close the explanatory gap in a structurally similar way: by relocating the gap rather than resolving it. Functionalism identifies consciousness with function at the cost of the absent qualia objection; Integrated Information Theory offers a precise mathematical account at the cost of a contested exclusion postulate and an implied graded panpsychism; panpsychism denies the gap's founding premise at the cost of the unsolved combination problem. Drawing on Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument, and Goff's Russellian monism, this thesis argues that recognizing this shared pattern is more honest than favoring whichever theory's cost is least visible, and examines the practical stakes of this unresolved uncertainty for AI moral status, animal consciousness, and the documented misdiagnosis of human patients with disorders of consciousness. The work also returns directly to this author's earlier claims about the Soul in The Tripartite Death Model, offering a substantive but limited correction rather than either vindication or dismissal.