Passage A
The persistence of the mind-body problem stems from the fundamental asymmetry between objective physical properties and subjective conscious experience. Reductive physicalism attempts to explain consciousness entirely in terms of neural mechanisms and functional states. However, this approach inevitably leaves out the qualitative character of experience—what it is like to perceive the redness of an apple or the sharpness of a pain. Even if we possessed a complete neurobiological account of the brain’s processes, this objective description would not logically entail the subjective feeling itself. This "explanatory gap" is not merely an artifact of our current scientific ignorance, but a principled limitation of the physical sciences. Physical properties are essentially structural and relational, whereas conscious experiences possess an intrinsic, qualitative nature. Therefore, any exhaustive physical description of the universe will be inherently incomplete, requiring us to acknowledge an irreducible, non-physical aspect of reality.
Passage B
Proponents of property dualism often cite the "explanatory gap" as evidence that conscious experience cannot be reduced to physical brain states. They correctly observe that the subjective quality of experience defies logical deduction from physical principles, but they draw a flawed ontological conclusion. This intuition, while rhetorically powerful, rests on a misunderstanding of how our cognitive architecture represents information. The gap is not an ontological divide in reality, but an epistemological illusion generated by our brain's disparate representational systems. When we introspect on a conscious state, we employ phenomenal concepts that are immediate and lack internal structural articulation; when we engage in scientific inquiry, we use physical concepts that are purely relational. The fact that we cannot logically deduce a phenomenal concept from a physical one merely reflects this dual architecture, not a divided universe. As theoretical neuroscience progresses, it will explain precisely why specific neural architectures generate these parallel introspective formats, thereby dissolving the illusion of the gap rather than bridging it.
Statement
The authors of Passage A and Passage B would both agree that the concepts scientists use to describe physical mechanisms cannot be used to logically deduce the qualitative concepts we use to describe our conscious experiences.
Based on the passages provided, is the statement above true or false?
Answer: Answer