Avshalom Elitzur’s “Bafflement Argument” says people’s persistent talk about qualia is itself physical evidence that subjective experience affects behavior rather than merely accompanying brain activity.
The argument targets causal closure—the view that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause—because if consciousness changes neural outcomes, standard physical accounts may be incomplete.
Elitzur says treating qualia as causally idle leaves physicalism with a harder task: explain why purely neural machinery generates reports, theories and confusion about an allegedly causally inert phenomenon.
Using David Chalmers’ zombie thought experiment, he argues a duplicate without experience could mirror information processing, but that still would not explain bafflement about why any processing feels like anything.
The result sharpens a four-way tension among real qualia, nonreducibility, causal closure and truthful self-reports, pushing physicalists toward illusionism or reductionism and Elitzur toward loosening closure.