Reconciling Revelation with Physicalism

I argue that physicalism can be reconciled with revelation — the thesis that introspection gives us super-justified insight into the essential nature of our phenomenal states — despite the fact that revelation and related epistemic accounts of phenomenal transparency are thought to be the main driver of anti-physicalist intuitions. Although certain phenomenal states, like colour states, are thought to be simple and primitive, there may exist a complex underlying structure beneath such states which is not open to introspection. The non-introspectability of such structure can still be made compatible with revelation, provided the higher-level phenomenal states were multiply realizable by these underlying structures, which would be contingent features of the higher-level phenomenal state. Additionally, I argue that a non-relationist account of phenomenal experience, on which we acquire our experiences of phenomenal qualities by virtue of being constituted by these qualities, is best suited to explain the super-justification of our direct phenomenal beliefs. Taken together, this establishes that the revelation thesis is consistent with physicalism, and therefore severely diminishes the intuitive force in favour of the explanatory gap.