Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

Synapses and action potentials 163
us further. In the end, if the science of consciousness fails to make progress on
the hard problem, the pessimists will have been proven correct, but today many
avenues of scientific inquiry remain to be explored. While we may salute the
devil’s advocate for explicating the defeatist point-of-view, more constructive
results may yet be had from not abandoning the task.
Among those still hopeful of an explanation, it is axiomatic that there must
be neuronal correlates of consciousness: as far as we know, mind does not drift
free of a material, specifically biological, and more precisely a neuronal substrate
(Searle 1997). But, although there may be general agreement that mind
and brain are somehow locked together, it has remained thoroughly unclear
how any particular set of material “correlates” couldleadtosubjectivity.What
we therefore need in a fundamental theory of consciousness is some indication
that the objectively-verifiable material mechanisms of the science of mind
should indeed have a subjective “internal” dimension.
In so far as current explanations of consciousness do not provide links
between subjective processes and objective brain mechanisms, an explanatory
gap remains. To fully close that gap, (i) more precise specification of neuronal
mechanisms (a scientific task) and (ii) the development of a self-consistent terminology
concerning the relevant psychological phenomena (a philosophical
task) are needed. Progress has certainly been made in both of those realms.
Non-invasive techniques have succeeded in demonstrating brain responses to
extremely subtle psychological phenomena (e.g., the sudden perception of the
face of Jesus in a collection of splotches of ink [Landis et al. 1984] or the changing
perspective on the Necker cube [Inui et al. 2000]). Philosophical progress
is harder to quantify, but the focus on the phenomena of consciousness has arguably
led to a more consistent use of the terminology in consciousness studies.
(For example, the use of the word “consciousness” to mean exclusively
“self-consciousness” is certainly on the wane.) Neither path of study is likely
to reach final conclusions any time soon, but I maintain that it is already possible
to draw a link between the objective and subjective worlds, i.e., to build a
conceptual bridge across the explanatory gap.
Responses to the explanatory gap
At the risk of unfairly caricaturizing the various responses to the problem of the
explanatory gap, it is convenient to summarize some of the prominent ideas
concerning the problem of subjectivity along the lines of the five academic
fields involved in the debate. The first is: