Emergent Consciousness Debunked

When you ask the mainstream scientist about consciousness, he offers one of the 3 ireconcilable answers depending on who is asking and/or what they are asking about.1.)Consciousness emerges from complex neural activities.2.)Consciousness does not exist.3.)We donnot know what or how consciousness comes about.Like a dishonnest magician stealthly swapping the hats and then pulling out the rabbit, our 'scientist' will obviously win every argument. When you give him a new idea, such as quantum mind, he objects with '1'. When you ask him to explain, he replies with '3'. When a dualist object that consciousness is beyond science, he releases the '2' joker card.So if we donnot shoot these wishy washies one at a time, we will get hopelessly lost chasing the moving born.EMERGENCEOur scientist immediately switches gears and is now a full blown poet. He is now going to entirely use metaphors and analogies. At once, we don't have neurons on the table. We now have water. Water is a collection of molecules. Non of the individual molecules have some ill defined property termed 'wettness' and yet the bulck of them, water, has. So he forms analogya)brain -> waterb)neurons -> atomsc)consciousness -> wetnessUnfortunately, though, analogies are scientifically worthless. They are often meant to help the lazy to quickly grasp a difficult idea. In this particular instance, analogy is not being used as a guidance to a difficult idea. It is used as a smock in the arena to hid unjustifyable ghosts that the magician is trying to surreptitiously introduce.A GUIDE TO PROPER USE OF ANALOGIES: The theoretician must be able to drop the analogy and explain the real thing. Analogies SHOULD be dispensable in a theory.All these stupid analogies emergentists offer suffers exactly the same set of problems. Let me quickly peruse through the glarring one. 'wetness' is merely the property of matter that is due to its ability to flow and a percolate through other objects. Neurones too would flow in bulk and 'wet' things by percolating through those that have bigger spaces. Therefore if brain is analogous to water and neurones to atoms, then wetness will be analogous not to consciousness but to a type of 'wetness' caused by bigger 'atoms'.So let me summarise the definition of emergent propertyEmergent property is a property of the whole and yet non of the component of the whole has it. A tunnel is hollow yet non of the bricks used to constract it is hollow. We say 'hollowness' is an emergent property.This red herring has completely mislead neurologists into thinking that we can understand consciousness from neural activities in the same way we can understand hollowness from bricks. This analogy sets the boat off the track right at the beginning.The problem comes from failure to see that we can but only ammuse ourselves that each of the brick does not contribute to the property termed 'hollow'. To understand this, lets build our structure using extremely thin cylydrical sectors as 'bricks'. Then we end up with a solid and not anything hollow. Or in short, what emerges in a system with components still depends on a property in the components that is being summed over and over. We don't, for instance expect a nuclear bomb to surreptitiously emerge as we build the tunnel.PANPSYCHIC:Guess what? H-bomb has emerged from cement in a constraction siteDUALIST: Suddenly, our materialist has turn into a magician for just that specific instance.PANPSYCHIC: Yeah, I see. Things now emerge by the magic wand of a materialist!EMERGENCE DEPENDS ON CONSCIOUSNESSPerharps the most ridiculus thing with emergentism model of consciousness is that emergence itself is clearly due to consciousness. Without somene to to think about dust, particles out there, what we have is just motion. It is the conscious perception and consideration of motion that integrates verious motions of dust particles into a single activity we term it as 'tornado'. Tornado is completely abstract from particles. As an abstraction, it is contingent on the very same thing we are trying to understand. So emergence is the question itself and not the answer!PROTOCONSCIOUSNESSIf at all the emergentist is to make sense of consciousness, then the best idea is that of proto conscious events. The obvious problem with the analogies offered for the emergent phenomena is that in all cases, both the component, the system the properties of the components and the emergent properties are those gotten via a bird's angle type of observation otherwise incongruously termed as 'objective'. On the other hand, each neurone together with neural activities must be thought of as objective and yet consciousness must be thought of as to be entirely subjective! This is the crucial point where the analogy breaks. We are realy not saying that emergence don't happen. Rather, in the case of awareness, we lack the appropriate proto consciousness from which the consciousness must emerge. Like consciousness, protoconsciousness property must be gotten via solely subjective perception just as both water molecules and wetness are properties gotten via objective perception. Only this way can emergence analogy do justice to consciousness. But we see that neural activities fails miserably to be the protoconscious events.OBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSSome scientists are carefull to limit their use of the word 'conscious' to rifer only to what they can know of from what I may term it as 'Galilean Science'. Indead science is, by definition, objective knowledge and if consciousness is, by definition, entirely subjective, then consciousness fall outside scientific juridiction. The only reason a materialist stick their noses with their 'science' is that should science leave consciousness alone, then it provide an idealist with an exellent counter example of what can be certainly known of yet without a physical proof.The 'objective' definition of consciousness then can be: the ability of a system to act as a coherent whole. Then in this sence of 'consciousness', there is nothing at all logically problematic about 'consciousness' emerging from neural activities. One might then soundly say that the sense of 'I' is our subjective perception of a coherent brain just as we would perceive 'redness' when electromagnetic vibration is what is taking place 'objectively'.However, I don't like this object/subject dichotomy as the properties we wish to shove to 'objective' are realy not any less subjective than your notion of 'self'!Q:What is moon?A:Just a ball I am aware of that exist up thereThe only reason we regard consciousness as subjective is a lack of appropriate way of communicating our conscious states directly to other people. In other words, consciousness is subjective IN PRACTICE and not IN PRINCIPLE.
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