"emergent property" That, right there, is why I reject this kind of argument. It's not parsimonious. Temperature isn't an "emergent property". It's a name we'v

"emergent property" That, right there, is why I reject this kind of argument. It's not parsimonious. Temperature isn't an "emergent property". It's a name we've given to a measurable phenomenon; in fact, it's the name of the measurement, itself. Another un-parsimonious notion: "one of the most basic, widely-accepted facts about biological systems is that they can be conscious". Okay, if they can be conscious, what makes one conscious and another not? Why am I blessed with the gift of consciousness, but my cat isn't? Or if she is, why her, but not the spider in my bathroom she loves to torment? Or if it is, why not the bacterium on my toilet seat? Drawing imaginary lines somewhere in the middle of reality and saying "things on this side of the line have squooblith, but things on that side don't" is going to require a bit of explanation as to why the line is there, and not somewhere else. For myself, the most parsimonious answer I can find to all this is that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter, itself. So, sure, a rock (let alone a molecule of gypsum) is going to have a markedly different kind of experience than I do, what's to say that it doesn't have some kind of experience? It also nicely eliminates this "mystery" everyone seems to be down on: what could possibly be mysterious about something that is literally everywhere? But that's just me, and I readily admit that I'm rather anomalous, have studied this stuff for far too long, and taken a nontrivial amount of psychedelics. So, you know, grain of salt, &c.