>> The stubborn fact remains that, no matter how deeply we probe into the nature of bacon, eggs, oatmeal, and avocado toast—to say nothing of shakshuka, grits,

>> The stubborn fact remains that, no matter how deeply we probe into the nature of bacon, eggs, oatmeal, and avocado toast—to say nothing of shakshuka, grits, bear claws, or dim sum—or the interactions between these fundamental building blocks and, say, orange juice or coffee and the morning paper, we simply have no convincing theory to explain how such disparate, seemingly inert components give rise to the phenomenon we subjectively experience as “breakfast.” That's the best sentence I've read in a long time, despite the fact that the pandemic has me spending too much time surfing HN. I think the author makes a very solid, implicit, argument regarding the problem of consciousness. The "problem" is hard to pin down. It doesn't seem any more implausible to me that consciousness is an emergent property from our brain bio/chem/physics then that hurricanes and diamonds and stalagmites naturally emerge from their respective environments. Or that massive spaceships emerge from Conway's Game of Life. Of course humans claim that we're special - "My consciousness is more important than a darned stalagmite!" - thinking of ourselves as more important than rocks and hurricanes, as more special, gives us a desire to survive. Our predecessors who genuinely thought they were no more "special" than a stalagmite were ineffective at passing down their genes. So I claim that the hard problem of consciousness is not such a hard problem, but rather just a case of us humans being obsessed with ourselves.