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Comment by egjerlow

I don't (or at least didn't mean to) claim that the emerging properties of, say, Conway's game of life are intuitive. What I am claiming is that there is a qualitative difference between the outcomes of Conway and other physical emerging phenomena and the phenomenon of consciousness (and frankly, I have run out of ways to try to illustrate just how qualitatively different these things are). Just because both actual emergent phenomena and the phenomenon of consciousness are non-intuitive does not mean that they must necessarily be explainable in the same way any more than describing 'fog' and 'thoughts' to both be nebulous terms must mean anything beyond that.

Basically your claim is that everything we see in this world must be explicable in terms of physical laws or 'emergence' simply because emergence has shown to be correct when it comes to unimaginable things before. That, of course, does not logically follow. Of course, you're free to believe that, but then your only consistent claim can be "even if it's not logically true, I don't like to think that science cannot tell us everything.". Nothing more.

But you have already said that what I consider subjective experience is just 'my imagination' (the more I think of it, the more of an empty statement it seems to be. If consciousness is an illusion, then there must still be something that is 'being tricked', and then the question becomes how that phenomenon can happen. It's turtles all the way down.) If this is your stance, why are you still trying to convince me that subjective experience is something that will somehow be shown to be an 'emergent' property? Is it illusory or not?

parent egjerlow 7 years ago

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