(March 10, 2014 at 9:17 am)MindForgedManacle Wrote: Woah, wait, what? Slippery slope bro. Reality being self-organizing would not entail consciousness not being an emergent property of brains. It would just mean that this self-organization can bring about complex phenomena, not that it is ontologically fundamental. Quantum systems are always interacting and yet it is still perfectly sensible to talk about the interactions of separate quantum systems and the emergent properties of those systems that are not present in the lower levels of reality, such as entropy.
I agree that consciousness is a complex phenomena, but on another level, consciousness is also very simple: It is simply our subjective state of awareness.
Now when you wrote: "... this self-organization can bring about complex phenomena, not that it is ontologically fundamental," that made me think, but what about the self-organization? Don't you think that this "self-organization" is just as complex as consciousness itself? Or do you think that the self-organization becomes more and more complex over time?
If you think that the self-organization becomes more complex over time, then I could argue that all the complexity that it produces is already encoded within the self-organizing principle from the very beginning, which refutes the idea that the complexity of our consciousness is merely "emergent."
