The epistemological chasm between how we (implicitly and subjectively) perceive or imagine the actual world and how we (explicitly and “objectively”) think of its underlying entities has motivated perhaps the most disconcerting impasse in human thought: the explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical properties of the world. Here, I advocate a combination of philosophical skepticism and simplicity as an informed approach to arbitrate among theories of consciousness. I argue that the explanatory gap is rightly a gap in our understanding, but one that is not surprising; and we being observers biased by our first-person perspective and our existence may both hinder and (the realization we have them) assist our reasoning. Further, I unfold the concept of observer into two distinct notions based on its functional and phenomenal aspects, and exploit this device to elucidate the subject-observer relationship. Then, I proceed to analyze the philosophical zombie dilemma. Lastly, I contend that from a skeptical viewpoint, panpsychism (or neutral monism) is the most parsimonious doctrine accounting for the explanatory gap, and suggest that it would be possible to make headway in the hard problem of consciousness by uncovering non-trivial causal relationships between qualia states and functional states, if routine and controlled manipulation of neural circuits were easily available.

我们（隐性和主观）如何感知或想象现实世界与我们如何（明确和“客观”地）思考其潜在实体之间的认识论鸿沟可能引发了人类思想中最令人不安的僵局：现象和现象之间的解释鸿沟。世界的物理特性。在这里，我主张将哲学怀疑主义和简单性相结合，作为在意识理论之间进行仲裁的明智方法。我认为解释上的差距是我们理解上的一个差距，但这并不奇怪；作为观察者，我们的第一人称视角和我们的存在可能会阻碍和（我们对它们的认识）有助于我们的推理。此外，我将观察者的概念基于其功能和现象方面展开为两个不同的概念，并利用这个设备来阐明主体-观察者的关系。然后，我继续分析哲学僵尸困境。最后，我认为，从怀疑的角度来看，泛心论（或中性一元论）是解释解释差距的最简洁的学说，并建议通过揭示非平凡的因果关系，有可能在意识的难题中取得进展如果神经回路的常规和受控操作很容易获得，那么在感受态状态和功能状态之间。