Consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

But life can be entirely explained in terms of its parts and how those parts interact. Thereby life emerges. It's not radical emergence. But when it comes to consciousness from non-consciousness it is radical emergence. It doesn't matter how you put together non-conscious stuff it doesn't suddenly become conscious. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but p3 and p4 are actually one premise, no?  Radical emergence being the emergence of consciousness from total-non consciousness.  If I have that right, all of the rest before and after is non operative, and thus not necessary to the conclusion.

It's true that I could omit a lot of the premises. I just wanted to make things as clear as possible. So the entailments are all clear.

Does "total non consciousness" contain information, information processing, and information processing systems?  I ask because that, in general, is what theorists believe consciousness arose from (and continues to arise from).

But you can't leap from "information processing without consciousness" to "information processing with consciousness."

I included a bit that wasn't directed at me because I think it speaks to our interaction - omitted the rest, just to keep it neater - the same impulse that guided me in recognizing that this one premise contains all that's necessary to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly.  If there's a problem with this premise, the entailments cannot salvage the conclusion, and that problem would, itself...ripple down through those entailments.  

You've expanded on your idea of what is or is not radical emergence and decided that the emergence of life does not qualify.  Life coming from non life is not it.  What, then, makes consciousness coming from non consciousness radical?  Further, your statement at the outset that no matter how we arrange nonconscious stuff it doesn't become conscious seems false on it's face, doesn't it?  Isn't there at least one way to arrange nonconscious stuff that does, then, become conscious?  Are we not exactly such a thing ourselves?  

For the latter bit - what if there is no leap?  If consciousness is fundamental then you're dead wrong just in the framing without any regard for the facts.  Information processing can lead to information processing with consciousness..and so can literally anything else. If consciousness is fundamental there's no way your statements about information processing and what it can or cannot do could be true. If your observations about the scarcity of consciousness however arrived upon are true, then there's no way that consciousness could be fundamental as described. The hard problem is not -then- why we seem to possess subjective experiences - but why drops of water do not. Knowing everything about a world of consciousness and the mechanics thereof could not explain -that-.

(additionally, it may be interesting to you to explore it-from-bit ideas. where it is information and information processing that are fundamental, not consciousness as a narrow and particular application thereof, that is fundamental. The same sorts of observations and inferences are employed - but in this view we and the drop of water are both information processing, though of the two, only one of us is consciousness)