What does the emergent theory of consciousness mean/say?
In: Biology
An “emergent property” is where something isn’t a single thing by itself. It is a result of a combination of many things.
Think of it like an orchestra playing a song. If one violin stops, has the song stopped? No. How about if twenty instruments stopped? Maybe. Probably still the song would be going. But I could probably ask the one violinist I initially asked to stop to be the only person. To play. Ask her to play the melody of the song, and I still might recognise it. But… It isn’t the same as when the orchestra played it. But still recognizable.
The emergent theory of consciousness just says that what we experience as mind or consciousness is an emergent property of all the actions of all the cells in the brain. You can cut out bits, turn some off, back on again, and consciousness might be changed or diminished… But it doesn’t sit and live in any one part. It is a result of all the cells acting together.
Edit: typo fix
One very popular explanation for reality is materialism. This says that reality consists of just matter and other physical things (spacetime, fields, and so on).
(There are other competing explanations for reality. For instance idealism, which says that reality is imagined somehow in some mind or minds, like some kind of very solid dream. But we are only concerning ourselves with materialism here.)
Each of us can observe that we are conscious. It’s very hard to deny that we are conscious. (Although some people do deny it.) We are aware of sensations, of our thoughts, feelings, and so on. When we bite into an apple, we can feel and hear the crunch of the apple, and taste the apple.
Now, if materialism is true, then we have problem explaining conscious experience. How does plain old matter become conscious?
If we had the technology to make a brain cell by cell, at what point would it become conscious? And *why* would it become conscious?
That problem of explanation is called the [hard problem of consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness) in philosophy. It’s an open problem, meaning that no one has come up with a rock solid answer to it.
One possible answer, some people claim, is emergence. Emergence is the idea that new and unexpected things can arise out of complex systems. For instance, from tiny pieces of sand, we get sand dunes, which are kind of things in their own right.
So some people claim that consciousness arises or emerges out of the incredibly complex action of the brain.
Other claim that, no, emergence is non-explanation for consciousness because it hasn’t actually explained anything.
u/M_SunChilde offers the best “first step” explanation I’ve ever heard but fails to tell you why it matters and why you probably don’t like his very simple, intuitively acceptable, explanation.
So let me add step 2. We understand how brain cells work. They are little machines with very very simple programming that we understand. There isn’t any “soul” or spirit in a brain cell it is as much a spiritless piece or organic matter as a muscle cell.
If conciseness spring forth out of that then you are a deterministic machine. There isn’t really any you – just the illusion of you who thinks you are in control of yourself even as every thought you have and action you take is being determined by the positions of switches and dials you have no control over.
If we networked enough computers together we could create such a conciseness without doing anything special or different than what we have now.
Instead of an orchestra it is a hundred different stereos playing a hundred different prerecorded songs and it only sounds and you, the conductor, only thinks he is in control of the tune.
For you to be a true individual there has to be something that isn’t deterministic about you -even better, something that isn’t deterministic yet also under your control.
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