I've argued that there is an explanatory gap between the physical and the
mental, at least with respect to conscious experience. That argument has been
based largely on considerations of what's conceivable. It is the fact that we can
easily conceive of creatures satisfying certain physical conditions but lacking
qualia, or having radically different qualia, that testifies to the explanatory in-
adequacy of physicalistic theories. In this chapter I want to survey various at-
tempts at explanatory reduction and show why they don't succeed in closing
the gap. I'll begin, in section 4.2, with some general remarks concerning the
status of qualia as either intrinsic or relational properties. In section 4.3 I'll
explore the intuitive resistance to relational theories, specifically traditional
functionalism. In sections 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6 I'll turn to two more recent reduc-
tive strategies, "higher-order" theory and "representationalism."

It seems to me that a lot of the literature about qualia over the past two
decades can be seen as a pendulum, with various proposals bouncing back
and forth between treating qualia as intrinsic and treating them as rela-
tional, but none overcoming the basic structure of this dilemma: qualia as
intrinsic properties can't be integrated into a naturalistic framework, but no
proposal to treat them as relational seems at all compelling. We've seen the
first horn of the dilemma already. If we consider a property like the reddish-
ness of a visual experience, it certainly seems to be the paradigm of an in-
trinsic property. Yet, if it is, what property is it? Materialists must say that
it's a neurophysiological property, and it's precisely this hypothesis that is
vulnerable to the explanatory gap objection. The only hope for a successful
explanatory reduction seems to be in identifying qualia with suitable rela-
tional properties. ¹

Before we explore the problems with relational theories, it's important to
address an objection to the argument presented so far. It has been objected
to this sort of argument that the apparent explanatory gap between the neu-
rophysiological and the qualitative is merely that--apparent. It is an artifact

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