Week 1: Why describing isn't living
Orientation — the explanatory gap, Nagel's bat, and why this course is a practicum instead of a reading list
22 February 2027
Every other course you’ve taken about the mind hands you a description and calls it understanding. This one starts from the opposite premise: a perfect third-person account of what happens in a nervous system during pain still leaves out the one thing pain actually is to the person having it. That gap — between the complete physical story and the felt fact of experience — is usually called the explanatory gap, and it’s the reason this course is a practicum rather than a seminar.
Outline#
- the hard problem of consciousness, stated plainly: not “how does the brain work” but “why is there something it is like to be a brain doing that”
- Nagel’s bat, and why imagining sonar tells you nothing about having it
- the shape of the semester: four units, twelve inductions, one open question
- what “doing the practicum” actually requires of you each week, and why skipping straight to the write-up defeats the point
Teaching team
- Wren Okafor — Convenor