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Sure, people can make up explanations for consciousness all day, but saying it is 'emergent' is not a meaningful materialistic description. If you tell me the

by yters 6y ago

Sure, people can make up explanations for consciousness all day, but saying it is 'emergent' is not a meaningful materialistic description. If you tell me the Linux source code 'emerges' that gives me no understanding of how it works or how to write the thing myself. It is no different an explanation than to say 'god did it'. Materialism is the promise that we can break a thing down into components that when reassembled give us the same thing back. 'Emergence' is completely antithetical to this idea. As of right now, there are zero materialistic accounts for consciousnes, and no reason to think one is forthcoming. The only people holding out are those who presume materialism a priori, which is just circular.

sudosysgen 6y ago
That is not what is meant by emergent property. An emergent property is a property of a system that is not a property of its constitutive parts. For example, none of the lines of code of the Linux kernel alone have the property of being an operating system, but as a whole it does have such an attribute. So, a materialist would say that consciousness is an emergent attribute of matter, in that in a certain configuration matter obtains the property of being conscious whereas it didn't before. This account is faillible, because it makes the following prediction : changing the material configuration changes consciousness, and that one can create consciousness via material means. The first one is indeed a correct prediction, the second one cannot be proven yet. As for a mechanism for how exactly this happens, you are right that there are no satisfactory propositions yet, but non-materialists cannot generate one ether. There are ideas of how this could happen, for example I would suggest reading "I am a strange loop", by Hofstadter. There is no reason to believe that a materialist theory is impossible, though. In the end, I fail to see why one should abandon such a useful framework as materialism because of consciousness.
- yters 6y ago
  It's preferable to drop a incorrect explanation in favor of acknowledging we don't have an explanation. Like AA, the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

by yters 6y ago

sudosysgen 6y ago

That is not what is meant by emergent property. An emergent property is a property of a system that is not a property of its constitutive parts. For example, none of the lines of code of the Linux kernel alone have the property of being an operating system, but as a whole it does have such an attribute. So, a materialist would say that consciousness is an emergent attribute of matter, in that in a certain configuration matter obtains the property of being conscious whereas it didn't before. This account is faillible, because it makes the following prediction : changing the material configuration changes consciousness, and that one can create consciousness via material means. The first one is indeed a correct prediction, the second one cannot be proven yet. As for a mechanism for how exactly this happens, you are right that there are no satisfactory propositions yet, but non-materialists cannot generate one ether. There are ideas of how this could happen, for example I would suggest reading "I am a strange loop", by Hofstadter. There is no reason to believe that a materialist theory is impossible, though. In the end, I fail to see why one should abandon such a useful framework as materialism because of consciousness.

yters 6y ago
It's preferable to drop a incorrect explanation in favor of acknowledging we don't have an explanation. Like AA, the first step is to acknowledge the problem.