alt Hacker NewsThis is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?
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Not a gotcha at all, but I don't have a satisfying answer, nor am I confident there even is one. Best I can do is to say that I think consciousness and sense of self are at the very least closely related, and perhaps the very same phenomenon. "I" am the entity that realizes my own consciousness; consciousness is the qualia that makes "me" separable from all other entities.
Or something like that. This gets to the "dorm room bullshitting" level right quick.
Those are the questions and there’s stacks and stacks of philosophy pages written about it. Go have a whirl.
> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property.
I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own.
Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above