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bogus comments on There just has to be something more, you know? - Less Wrong
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He doesn't support entanglement directly, but it's kind of hard to explain otherwise how an electron can have a 'tiny speck' of conscious experience, whereas an individual 'self' can have experiences which are so much more complex than an electron's. A non-entangled state would just factorize into billions of individual 'selves', each of them completely independent of any others. This does not agree with our experience of psychological processes.
[emphasis mine]
By my reading of the essay, an electron can be a “tiny speck” of consciousness, not have it. Big difference.
Huh? If materialism is true and everything is matter including your conscious soul, why wouldn't an isolated[1] electron have conscious experiences? In a materialistic worldview, your soul does not have a little XML tag stating that it is a conscious entity, and neither do electrons.
[1] edited for clarity and consistency with the OP.
ETA: Just for the sake of clarity, it should be noted that emergent phenomena are just that--they can justify recurring patterns in a variety of physical systems, but they can hardly account for something as basic as our internal experiences. Especially when said emergent phenomena are merely postulated as such, with no details given and no evidence whatsoever.
Note that the above was in the removed part of the article.
A shame. It was a great line.
I would more than agree - it was part of what made it a good article. The post is much, much weaker without it.
Take a look at http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm
The site gives examples of Turing machines (a Universal one is included) implemented in Conway's Game of Life.
A collection of cells with a certain structure are a universal computer. This is (depending on what you mean exactly) an emergent phenomenon: no individual cell has any “small piece of universal computiness”.
They have a very short, very simple list of properties. The property of being able to compute any computable function belongs only to the system. Most arrangements of cells don’t have that property, but there are many arrangements that do.