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> But WHO is actually feeling that sensation? This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine wit

> But WHO is actually feeling that sensation? This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized value; it emerged as a phenomenon out of how the system as a whole ran. When you are in pain, your conscious mind - an emergent phenomenon from the physical processes of your body (primarily the brain), or so I suspect - observes itself. There is nothing mysterious in systems observing themselves; that's what a computer doing when it raises and responds to a segfault, for example.

raducu 6y ago
I'm not saying it is incorrect, but the emergent theory of self-awareness is a bit hand-wavy. Surely a primitive man could say an airplane flying is an emergent property of the airpland, like Aristotle said about many things? I was just questioning the level of satisfaction we would get as science would reach the best explanation of what sensations are. I think right now we are nowhere near that scientific knowledge.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind. Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing. Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.

raducu 6y ago

I'm not saying it is incorrect, but the emergent theory of self-awareness is a bit hand-wavy. Surely a primitive man could say an airplane flying is an emergent property of the airpland, like Aristotle said about many things? I was just questioning the level of satisfaction we would get as science would reach the best explanation of what sensations are. I think right now we are nowhere near that scientific knowledge.

mannykannot 6y ago
Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind. Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing. Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.