Answer

I’m not familiar with any organized material on the subject. As for the issue itself, the question is what you mean by an explanation. There is an explanation that says that given neural state X, there is a mental phenomenon Y. That is a kind of equation or correlation, and that kind of “explanation” is certainly possible. Just as force causes acceleration, so neural state X causes mental state Y. But if you are looking for a mechanism that begins with a neural state and shows how one gets from it to a mental state, there is no such thing at present, and as far as I know there isn’t even a language in which one can begin to think about it. I very much doubt that such an explanation can be reached, but I don’t know specific arguments for or against.
I spoke about two years ago (before I finished my book The Science of Freedom) with Yosef Neumann, a professor of life sciences at Tel Aviv University, a proud materialist and determinist (mentioned in the critique in my book God Plays Dice). He called me to talk; I no longer remember about what. But in the course of the conversation he told me that some of his materialist colleagues think there is no such thing as consciousness or mental states. Everything is neurons. And note well: not that the neural determines the mental, but that there is no mental at all. He himself told me that he cannot manage to explain to them that they are simply talking nonsense. This is empty-headed babble that denies facts, but there are intelligent people who are captive to this foolish discourse. In his own view (sane materialism), ontologically there are only neurons, but they generate the mental states (which emerge from them). This is the approach called emergence, which holds that the mental is a property of the material whole, that is, a phenomenon that emerges from it (and not another kind of entity).
I don’t see how there could be specific arguments against such a position, aside from the fact that it is just plainly unreasonable. Of course there are no arguments in its favor either, since all the talk about strong emergence (that is, that even though one cannot reduce the macroscopic properties to the micro, still ontologically there is nothing besides the micro) is without any empirical basis, and in my book Neuroscience I explained why there can never be such a basis for it (because the moment we discover strong emergence in science, by definition it will be weak).
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Questioner:

I more or less understood… I’ll try to read that part in The Science of Freedom.
I started thinking about it a bit, and to approach it from this direction:
If our experience is not an “entity,” then it must be identical (not a correlation, but actual identity) with some material object in our world.
But by definition (the definition we have made, in contemporary physics), elementary particles certainly do not contain anything beyond themselves. Physical material phenomena also only describe the dynamics of elementary particles of matter and the physical properties of that same matter…
Even if we take the totality of very complex dynamics, one of our assumptions in physics is that the whole contains nothing more than its parts, (maybe this is connected to the assumption of locality…) otherwise we would see phenomena that are not explained by the interaction of elementary particles and basic laws of physics, but by some quality that lies beyond them…
But still, consciousness is one of our primary experiences, and it certainly “exists” in some sense, so it follows that it does not “exist” in the material world…
What do you think?

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Rabbi:
As I wrote to you, there are those who argue that the mental is a property of the neural whole. It is not another entity. Properties also exist in the world, but they are borne by entities or characterize them; they are not entities in themselves.
The liquidity of water is a property of a collection of water molecules and not a separate entity. But it also does not characterize an individual molecule, and therefore there is something in the whole that is not in its parts (I don’t know whether the term “beyond its parts” is suitable here). True, here this is a case of weak emergence, since there is a clear explanation that derives the macroscopic property (liquidity) from the properties of the molecules. Still, the logical relation can also exist with respect to properties that emerge strongly from the particulars (that is, not only are they different from the properties of the particulars, but there is not even a reduction of them to the properties of the particulars).
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Questioner:
There is a very big difference… liquidity, and every other material phenomenon, is basically a compressed description of the total dynamics of the liquid’s molecules. I am not claiming, like the postmodernists, that there is not really a physical law that causes molecules to be liquid, and that it is only a convenient description; there is such a law, but it, the molecules, time, and space are the only things that exist, and the property is only a certain way of observing (or grasping) those entities, or of grasping them. If the property of liquidity exists at all, it exists in our minds and in our perception, not in reality itself.
 
With this definition of a property, I cannot manage to assign meaning to the claim that “the mental is a property of the neural whole”… Is that how we perceive the neural whole? Do we look at a person’s brain and see (even if only ideationally) his consciousness?
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Rabbi:
That is exactly the difference between strong and weak emergence. I agree, and that is why I wrote that their picture is not plausible. But I do not know arguments that explain or prove this (of course it is possible that there are such arguments and I simply do not know them).