I can see what points you’re making, but it’s unclear what you’re arguing for. It would be helpful if you made that explicit, too.
My best guess is that you don’t think that consciousness is emergent. What then, do you consider the nature of consciousness to be? Are you perhaps agnostic on the matter?
I agree that strong emergence sounds like magic and I’m therefore highly sceptical of its existence. I find consciousness one of the most intriguing and mysterious phenomena we know of - I don’t really think I understand it to a degree where I can make confident claims about its nature. But dualism sounds like magic too, so weak emergence seems to me the most reasonable and likely mechanism, not least because it’s one we actually observe in reality.
I lean toward agnosticism here, because I see real merits and pitfalls on both sides. If I were clever enough, I’d try to devise an experiment that cut between them—but part of me suspects that no such experiment is possible, precisely because the conceptual frame might already bias the outcome.
I’m wary of dismissing strong emergence simply because it ‘sounds like magic.’ That response risks becoming circular: we assume everything unexplained must eventually be physically explainable, since everything explained so far has been physical. But that’s not really evidence—it’s induction edging into dogma.
This is where I find Wittgenstein helpful. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ But silence, to me, doesn’t mean disengagement. It means recognizing that consciousness may resist the clean resolutions science is used to delivering. To turn away from that means not being rigorous. To turn away from that mystery just because it unsettles our frameworks seems to me to miss something vital about living—and thinking—at all.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I don’t really disagree with anything you laid out here.
I’ll just add that I think we don’t yet have the conceptual frameworks to fully describe (and by extension - understand) the problem in the first place.
Yes, strong emergence seems like magic, as does dualism. But if there is no magic, consciousness feels like the closest thing to it; so who knows?
I can see what points you’re making, but it’s unclear what you’re arguing for. It would be helpful if you made that explicit, too.
My best guess is that you don’t think that consciousness is emergent. What then, do you consider the nature of consciousness to be? Are you perhaps agnostic on the matter?
I agree that strong emergence sounds like magic and I’m therefore highly sceptical of its existence. I find consciousness one of the most intriguing and mysterious phenomena we know of - I don’t really think I understand it to a degree where I can make confident claims about its nature. But dualism sounds like magic too, so weak emergence seems to me the most reasonable and likely mechanism, not least because it’s one we actually observe in reality.
I lean toward agnosticism here, because I see real merits and pitfalls on both sides. If I were clever enough, I’d try to devise an experiment that cut between them—but part of me suspects that no such experiment is possible, precisely because the conceptual frame might already bias the outcome.
I’m wary of dismissing strong emergence simply because it ‘sounds like magic.’ That response risks becoming circular: we assume everything unexplained must eventually be physically explainable, since everything explained so far has been physical. But that’s not really evidence—it’s induction edging into dogma.
This is where I find Wittgenstein helpful. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ But silence, to me, doesn’t mean disengagement. It means recognizing that consciousness may resist the clean resolutions science is used to delivering. To turn away from that means not being rigorous. To turn away from that mystery just because it unsettles our frameworks seems to me to miss something vital about living—and thinking—at all.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I don’t really disagree with anything you laid out here.
I’ll just add that I think we don’t yet have the conceptual frameworks to fully describe (and by extension - understand) the problem in the first place.
Yes, strong emergence seems like magic, as does dualism. But if there is no magic, consciousness feels like the closest thing to it; so who knows?