<|im_start|>system
You are a helpful AI assistant.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
What is explanatory gap? How does it relate to qualia ?<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
Explanatory gap is the inability to know what an experience feels like even after knowing all the physical properties that make up that experience.

An example of this is the Mary's room experiment. The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. The thought experiment asks whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she experiences seeing color. If explanatory gap is true then she would gain new knowledge from that experience despite knowing all physical descriptions of color.

This relates to qualia, individual instances of subjective experience, because explanatory gap states that you cannot know that such a subjective experience feels like if you do not experience it yourself.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
Can you simplify your answer?<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
Sure. The explanatory gap is our inability to explain "the hard problem of consciousness". In other words, we can provide explanations for the easy problem, such as how our brains process visual information, but this fails to explain why we have a subjective experience, such as the qualia of redness. Nowhere in the laws of physics can we find the property of the redness. Redness is something only experienced in the mind. How, then, did redness come to exist? We know that redness exists because we can experience it, but how redness exists is a mystery. This is the explanatory gap.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
How does the Mary's room argument relate to qualia?<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
Mary's Room is a thought experiment proposed by philosopher Frank Jackson in 1982 that is used to illustrate the problem of qualia. The thought experiment goes like this: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is confined to a black and white room and knows everything there is to know about color, except what it looks like. When she is finally allowed to leave her room and experience color for the first time, she learns something new.

The argument is used to illustrate the idea that subjective experience cannot be fully explained by a scientific understanding of the brain. The argument suggests that, even if Mary knows everything there is to know about color from a scientific perspective, she still has a new experience when she actually sees color for the first time. This suggests that there is something more to experience than what can be explained by science.

In conclusion, the Mary's Room argument is used to illustrate the difficulty in explaining subjective experience or qualia through scientific means. It suggests that subjective experience is something more than what can be explained by our current scientific understanding of the brain.<|im_end|>