“Well, I mean, “emergent” fundamentally means that at some level it’s not there, but then at a different level something is there. So the classical example of an emergent property is the wetness of water. If you take one or two molecules of H2O, they’re not wet. But then you take trillions of them, 1023, and then suddenly you get this property that it clings to surfaces that we know as wetness. With consciousness, for the longest [time] I also believed, well, it’s an emergent property—small brains don’t have it and then once you get to some bigger brains they do have it. But the problem with that assertion is that consciousness is so fundamentally different from anything else. Neurons and neuromechanisms are so different from the perception they can generate. My perception of having pain, or my perception of seeing red, is so radically different from the neurons that support the perception of seeing red or the neurons that support the perception of having pain that it’s totally unclear how we can go from one to the other. So finally then, I at least came to the conclusion that it is a fundamental property of certain pieces of highly organized matter, that highly organized matter such as brain are capable of, and do have, experiences. We just live in a world with space and time and mass and energy, and also where complex organized matter has conscious experience; and that’s just the character of the world we are in. Now we can study this property; and the property that organized matter has to have in order to have consciousness; and how much consciousness [it has]. And if every piece of organized matter has consciousness, what about a fetus? What about an early born? What about a patient with severely compromised … [with] most of his brain dysfunctional? What about a dog? What about a cat? What about a worm? And then of course, I can ask the same question: If this is true, what about other pieces of organized matter that didn’t evolve but that we built, like computers or like the Internet? To what extent do they have conscious experience? To what extent does it feel like something to be there?”
- A Momentary Flow: Why do you say consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain?
- A Momentary Flow: Why do you say consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain?
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