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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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This is a great example in support of something I often think about. We see our consciousness as "me" and as "the thing in charge" of the body, but really it's more of an ancillary subprocess that the body runs for its own benefit. It's just a special subprocess that does its job best when it mistakenly thinks of itself as being the boss of the body.
Read 'blindsight'
Consciousness is 100% an emergent property.
Thanks for the daily dose of mini-existential crisis 🫠
[Internal Monologue] What the fuck am I? HOW IS BEING ALIVE POSSIBLE? WTF?!?
You are a nervous system, piloting a space suit made of meat.
Can you explain what this means?
Conscious (sentience / sapience) is an ineffable, unmeasurable, quality. There is no way to say that one sentient being is more or less sentient than another. In fact there is no way to tell that I am not the only consciousness in existence but it feels rude not to give others the benefit of the doubt. We can create neurons and even small brains in the lab but we don’t have any way to instill life into that neuron. Consciousness simply emerges out of the constituent parts of being alive, possibly even as a result of the interactions of such a complex system.
There's no biological structure the creates consciousness to the ppint where you can say "if you have x, you're conscious", to the point where saying "humans are conscious" or even "only humans are conscious" aren't always true. Many elephants are conscious. Some dogs are consciohs. Some humans aren't. And no, the split between humans are/aren't conscious ARE NOT CORRELATED WITH DEMOGRAPHIC (fuck Nazis and racists), nor is it easy to draw a line in the sand because it's a spectrum.
It comes from having a brain that's complex enough. Decision making process start interacting together in unexpenced ways, with subtle variations caused by genetics and history. Literally just read the wikipedia page the previous person posted and apply that same logic to brains and minds.
Like why Reubens are so good. I don’t like salty protein, bread with caraway seeds, thousand island dressing or Swiss cheese, but fuck is a Reuben delicious.
Reubens are the only beef food I used eat in my 20s. I've since switched to seitan, but there's something about the combo that just works. The rye bread is a key part of it.
That’s why I said salty protein :) Swiss cheese is imo so unremarkable that the dairy free version is just as good, and a vegan Reuben is still a perfect sandwich.
It would be strongly emergent then. And strong emergence is basically magic.
I don't see how either sentence follows. Rephrasing your comment and supplementing it with context to explain your reasoning may better communicate your point.
Weak emergence has qualities that arise from the fundamental features of the parts and the rules that connect them. For example, the shapes made by flocks of birds can be reduced to simple local interactions among the birds.
Strong emergence has qualities that cannot, even in principle, be reduced to the parts and their rules. These qualities are genuinely novel and bring powers that are not found in the constituents alone.
Strong emergence is like mixing two chemicals in a lab and, instead of producing a new compound, discovering an entirely new fundamental force of nature. Consciousness, in particular, seems to lack any physically grounded ontology. While this is a divisive claim, it is hardly original. Physicalists who appeal to weak emergence have not yet shown—nor may they ever be able to show—that consciousness is physically emergent. If strong emergence is to be taken seriously, it must be framed in a way that avoids looking like something from nothing, which would be indistinguishable from magic.
As of now, the physicalists have to demonstrate weak emergence. Failing that, we cannot dismiss strong emergence so that we don't close the investigative and theory making space.
That makes more sense. Thanks for the response! I'm not sure if can agree with your conclusions. It may be that I'm still missing context you're working within. My best guess is you're assume some axioms that I am not. That doesn't necessarily mean I think you're incorrect. We might just be operating with different frameworks.
I agree that strong emergemce and weak emergence seem different by your definitions. I'm not convinced strong emergemce is a thing. Is there a compelling argument that the perception of strong emergence is actually a more complex weak emergence that the observers have not fully understood?
Something something Occam's Razor / god of the gaps something. I find these sorts of discussions quite compelling. Thanks again for engaging. :)
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?
He's not communicating. He's bragging. Although in truth, he's actually demonstrating because there's no purpose in showing you his knowledge. That means he's showing you what he understands and sees rather than explaining. Explaining is extensive and difficult because the many are blind even though they can read so often don't see their own lack of ability to see reality.
I can explain more deeply but I think I'm just going to go masterbate instead.
Weird flex but... Ok.
That's not muscle. Even metaphorically. He's trying to help you better than most. Look, see how well explantion even did?
I mean that’s basically what a person who is a vegetable is (sorry, don’t know the correct terminology, someone probably will be offended by that phrase)
In a coma?
In a vegetative state would be more accurate:
Didn’t know that! Thanks for the clarification!
I didn't either til I looked it up!
Spot the fuck on. BTDT.