I agree with your two statements: > Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. > There's no magic behind it, just mystery bec

I agree with your two statements: > Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. > There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. But I still believe there's a hard problem (that is, its difficult to explain my sense of interiority using the dynamics and grammars of the substrates that surely give rise to the emergent behavior we call consciousness). By substrate I'm referring to the base layer in emergence (i.e. emergent phenomena and their dynamics emerge from a more basic layer with its own phenomena/dynamics, which is the substrate). As physics is the substrate for chemistry, and chemistry for biology, and biology for psychology, and psychology for society, etc... (please ignore the that I've surely leapt over or ignored various layers here and/or suggested some type of linearity rather than heirarchy). With each emergent layer, the explanatory power of the substrate(s) wanes. Perhaps the immediate substrate is still occasionally illuminating (e.g. I can talk about valence in terms of physical properties of electron orbits, or I can talk about metabolism in terms of the chemistry of the Krebs cycle, etc...) but it becomes difficult to talk about biology (cells, tissues, organic processes, etc...) in terms of physics. I have no doubt that physics is a substrate of biology (i.e. I'm a materialist), but its not terribly useful to deploy the standard model in explaining cancer. In the same way, I assume it to be true that physics is also a substrate of consciousness, but it isn't clear to me how our sense of interiority arises in the emergent layers. I assume its because I'm ignorant (its just a mystery), but it hasn't made the problem any less hard.