(September 19, 2016 at 6:23 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: I've never been a proponent of emergent properties. It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness. The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive. My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory. (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.) I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction. The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.
Is there a non-arbitrary "critical mass" at which any mechanism or process represents the most fundamental thing that can still be called "consciousness?" It seems to me the end of the road is likely to be in those most simple states that could be said to represent information-- the emission and absorption of photons, for example, or changes in the energetic state of electron orbits.
