With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces).
Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that.
Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.
You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight).
So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.
There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market.
Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.
So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
This is begging the question. Consciousness is the sheer seeming-ness of my experience. Perhaps it is reducible to computation, perhaps not, but this is precisely what is under contention.
The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.
> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).
Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.
So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.
> With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block.
...it sounded like there were no plausible candidates. If computation is a candidate, then it's certainly something they can point at (with the caveat that it's only a candidate and not currently testable). I think if instead you had written something along those lines and avoided the words "not capable of", then hoseja and I wouldn't have reacted.
For what it's worth, I do feel that panpsychism was my "natural" belief when I was a kid, until the adults told me it was crazy to believe in that. I still don't think it's crazy, and there are some people who I respect a lot who believe in panpsychism.
What does qualia (plural, btw) "are part of the emergent phenomenon" mean in practice? That just seems to be begging the question.
If you want to explain qualia, you have to do two things. The first is explain the nature of the experiencing entity. This means defining the precise mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity instead of simply existing as objective state correlates. This in turn means explaining the nature of all of subjective experience.
The second is to explain the precise mechanism by which external inputs and internal states generate the experiences the entity has.
Most of the "Well it's obvious and there's no problem here" positions rely on the fallacy that defining a complicated-enough objective correlate - such as the detailed state of a computer with some form of introspection - solves the problem.
It doesn't. In fact it doesn't even begin to understand the problem. It's simply a statement of hope and faith with no empirical support that a complicated-enough state with enough introspection will somehow cross the border from automatic operation to sentient experience, just because it will, obviously.
Why are you implying some kind of mental entity that "does the experiencing"?
Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion.
And that initial assumption is a profoundly personal one, the only consciousness anyone has experience with is their own. Even if we share some initial spark of consciousness across humans there is pretty solid evidence that everyone has a different experience of reality (eg, synesthesia) that make arguing from qualia very hard. It is difficult to see how it isn't just a leap of faith either way. If it is possible, then it is basically certain. If it is impossible, then that is the end of it. Either way we can perfectly account for our experiences.
A humourous interpretation is maybe I'm a philosophical zombie where my consciousness is an emergent soup and you are a genuine consciousness with all sorts of special experiences. That really muddles the water over what the argument is even about; I would reasonably and rationally never be convinced that consciousness existed. All the evidence for the argument would be inaccessible to me but you couldn't exactly dismiss me as not being equal to yourself because you don't have evidence either way either.
What puzzles me is the persistence of identity across interruptions of consciousness, even though your brain can be mutated while you are not there.
The only mostly permanent thing in the brain is neuronal DNA since most neurons don’t undergo mitosis.
At least that's my thinking. It's not my area at all.