Akselrud's Explanatory Faculty: Consciousness as Internalized Explanation

Key Takeaways

• Core Claim

Phenomenal consciousness is the mind's primitive, ungrounded explanatory faculty turned upon its own states—self-consciousness as internalized explanation—and the hard problem is denied, re-diagnosed as a structural collision between incompatible explanatory modes rather than a feature of nature.

• How It Works

An immediate, criterionless, quasi-aesthetic recognition of explanations, applied recursively in self-reflection ("I understand why I thought or acted so"), constitutes minimal self-consciousness; the felt continuity of experience is ongoing self-explanation.

• Challenges & Tensions

The account denies rather than explains phenomenality and offers no mechanism; it rests on a claimed primitive "explanatory faculty" whose existence and human uniqueness are asserted; and, being explicitly self-instantiating, it is unfalsifiable by its own lights.

Akselrud's Explanatory Faculty: Consciousness as Internalized Explanation

Applied mathematician Boris Akselrud's explanatory-faculty theory holds that phenomenal consciousness is constituted by the mind's innate, ungrounded capacity to generate and recognize explanations, turned reflexively upon its own states—"self-consciousness is internalized explanation" (Akselrud, 2025). On this account, the hard problem is neither solved nor dissolved but denied: it is not a property of nature but a structural collision between two mutually exclusive explanatory forms: impersonal physical lawfulness and first-person givenness, each coherent alone and paradoxical when fused. Because every theory of consciousness is itself a product of the faculty it attempts to explain, consciousness studies cannot step outside explanation to explain the explainer, and the field's proliferation of rival theories is read as the predicted signature of that predicament rather than a sign of immaturity. The theory presents itself as neither mysterianism nor illusionism nor a mechanism, but as a relocation of the problem from nature to the structure of explanation itself.

Consciousness as Internalized Explanation

The core identification is between consciousness and the inward exercise of an explanatory faculty. In self-reflection, the mind becomes at once the subject and the object of explanation, and the recursion "I understand why I thought or acted so" constitutes, for Akselrud, the minimal form of self-consciousness; the felt continuity of experience arises from ongoing self-explanation. What is felt as the intelligibility of one's own states is the faculty operating upon itself. Akselrud distinguishes this from higher-order and self-representational theories (Rosenthal, 2005; Kriegel, 2009): explanatory recognition is not the representation of one mental state by another but the terminal, criterionless act by which any such representation would itself have to be recognized as explanatory. The claim is meant to sit beneath the higher-order accounts rather than alongside them.

The Criterionless Faculty of Recognition

Humans, on this view, uniquely possess a faculty for recognizing explanations that is immediate, quasi-aesthetic—akin to the recognition of beauty or simplicity—and terminal: explanations are recognized, not justified. The faculty is primitively given rather than derived from any prior standard, and Akselrud enlists developmental evidence that recognition, not information quantity, governs inquiry: infants preferentially explore expectation-violating objects and test hypotheses matched to the violation (Stahl and Feigenson, 2015), and children's exploration ceases the moment an anomaly is explained away (Bonawitz et al., 2012). Like curiosity, whose own science can neither define nor ground it (Kidd and Hayden, 2015), explanation is treated as a given of cognition. This grounds the theory's anti-foundational move: the demand for something underlying explanation that would elucidate its structure is a category error, since a candidate ground counts as a ground only by being recognized as explanatory—the very phenomenon at issue. The regress, Akselrud writes, is not blocked; it never begins.

Re-Diagnosing the Explanatory Gap

The explanatory gap (Levine, 1983) and the hard problem (Chalmers, 1995) are re-described as a local instance of a universal friction among forms of sense-making. Impersonal lawfulness and first-person givenness are incompatible explanatory modes—each coherent in isolation, paradoxical when fused—on the model, Akselrud suggests, of the quantum measurement problem. No two human explanations ever fully cohere; the gap at consciousness is simply the most acute case, and the felt hard problem is the recognition of an enclosure misread as the discovery of an unexplained property.

Denial rather than Solution

Explanation, for Akselrud, is not a metaphysical discontinuity but the same kind of given, ungrounded endowment as the faculties of other animals—curiosity, navigation—differing in elaboration, not in ontological category: fish swim, birds fly, humans explain. This inverts Nagel's (1974) bat. The isolation Nagel locates in our inability to occupy the bat's point of view becomes not a gulf between species but the shared predicament of every organism sealed within its given faculty: we are as enclosed within explanation as the bat within echolocation. The hard problem is accordingly an artifact of positing a special human interior demanding a special explanation, where there is only a more elaborate instance of the universal condition of the faculty-bound organism. The position is explicitly neither mysterianism, which posits a real property beyond cognitive reach (McGinn, 1989), nor illusionism, which denies phenomenality (Frankish, 2016).

Reflexive Stability

Akselrud claims no exemption from his own theory. It is itself, reflexively, an explanation and stands only insofar as it is recognized as explanatory—exactly what it predicts of any theory. What would be self-refutation for a foundationalist account is offered here as self-instantiation: the theory exhibits the terminal, criterionless recognition it describes—and it is thus unfalsifiable by its own lights. The proliferation of hundreds of coexisting theories of consciousness (Kuhn, 2024) is taken as the direct signature of the explanatory multiplicity it predicts.

References

Akselrud, B. (2025). Homo sapiens: The Species That Explains. Manuscript.

Bonawitz, E. B., van Schijndel, T. J. P., Friel, D., & Schulz, L. (2012). Children balance theories and evidence in exploration, explanation, and learning. Cognitive Psychology, 64(4), 215–234.

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.

Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11–12), 11–39.

Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y. (2015). The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron, 88(3), 449–460.

Kriegel, U. (2009). Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kuhn, R. L. (2024). A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 190, 28–169. The continuing proliferation in the number of theories of consciousness is exemplified on this Landscape of Consciousness website—loc.closertotruth.com.

Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64(4), 354–361.

McGinn, C. (1989). Can we solve the mind–body problem? Mind, 98(391), 349–366.

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.

Rosenthal, D. M. (2005). Consciousness and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stahl, A. E., & Feigenson, L. (2015). Observing the unexpected enhances infants' learning and exploration. Science, 348(6230), 91–94.