I don’t understand recent fuss about the nature of consciousness. Does it have physical substance? Can it cause? Is it an emergent property of brain?
Don’t people remember the levels of organization of life, as taught in high school? Physical. Chemical. Organic. Cellular. Every next level is based on (implemented with) the elements present on the previous level. Yes, emergent properties of the higher level can be explained (deconstructed) in terms of what’s going on at the lower level, but they can not be adequately represented in lower-level’s terms by definition.
Similarly, consciousness does not need to have crude physical nature in order to be able to participate in what can be called “causal chains”. It’s a level of organization of life, so some of its inherent properties and limitations are best explained in terms of the previous layer (neurons, functional specialization of brain areas etc.) while others can’t be boiled down to components without loosing their systemic properties.
[...] reading. I see this as a series of posts that summarize my opinion of various aspects of C. My post On nature of consciousness was a first such post, written before the book was [...]