(January 6, 2019 at 7:05 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: Because consciousness is an emergent property of very complex arrangements of matter, if you want to understand how it arises you have to study the particulars and how they work together, in the end, to produce it.
Here is my wife's analogy: Music doesn't exist in particular notes or instruments, it exists at an emergent level in the relationships between different notes played by different instruments at different times. You will never understand music if you study only single notes, but you won't understand it without that either.
In Molière's play, the patient asks the doctor why the sleeping medicine works. The doctor says it works due to its "dormative property." The audience all laughed at this, because they knew that "it works because it has the property of working" wasn't really an explanation.
"Electrochemical events in the brain are perceived by the subject as experiences because it's an emergent property and someday we'll know why that is" is about the same.
