Emergentism isn't simply saying that we don't know the steps, it's saying that the steps are not fundamentally knowable by studying the base reality underneath;

Emergentism isn't simply saying that we don't know the steps, it's saying that the steps are not fundamentally knowable by studying the base reality underneath; you have to study the higher-order system at it's own level of supervenience. The building blocks don't feel, the thing that emerges from the interactions between the building blocks is what feels, which isn't really a "thing" at all in the sense that the thing we've labelled as an electron might be a thing. That which we have labelled as an electron may or may not be a piece of the most fundamental, real reality (it could be implemented on some arbitrary hardware another level of supervenience down, but we could only theoretically discover that it is, not that it isn't). You and I, we're just labels put on the interactions between loosely defined collections of things, and those collections are just made up social constructs with no basis in base reality. We were useful to the patterns that repeat themselves many levels of supervenience below us, so we got made up. I oscillate between believing that electrons probably feel, believing that multi-electron systems with any level of information processing (i.e. any implementations of any functions besides the identity function and the constant functions) probably feel, and believing that some more complex, not yet fully understood subset of implemented functions are all that feels. I'm not actually trying to argue for or against emergentism, I'm super undecided about it. I've been leaning more towards it since my last acid trip, but the one before that had me going the other direction.