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RobinZ comments on There just has to be something more, you know? - Less Wrong
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In case it isn't clear, I agree that consciousness arises from physics. What I'm saying is that subjective experience is basic enough that we should expect it to be "on the territory" in some reasonably straightforward way. This is what materialism means. "Emergent" explanations of consciousness do not do this: they place subjective experience at the wrong level and postulate extremely complex bridging laws as a result.
Note that my argument does not apply to phlogiston or elan vital, since fire and life are not basic elements of perception. (It might apply to caloric fluid though, if we didn't know any better about how our heat perception works.)
Your comment has induced me to reread the thread, which leads me to believe we've been talking past each other to some extent. That said, I think we still disagree in two places.
First, I disagree with this:
and, second, I deny the implications of this:
Let me highlight two claims that I would make which drive this disagreement:
The present state of evidence strongly suggests (p > 0.99)* that consciousness, like combustion, is a high-level phenomenon which, in theory, can be completely described by an explanation not in terms of consciousness.
The overwhelming majority of physicalists active on LessWrong deny that "emergence" is a sufficient explanation of consciousness.
Please let me know if you disagree with either or both, or if there is some other significant claim on which we disagree, and we can resume from there.
* If you wish to claim that I am understating the strength of the evidence, at least grant that I am not overstating it.
(See also my reply to thomblake above)
You can get away with modeling consciousness as a high-level phenomenon, if you disregard subjective experience as unimportant. If there's even a small probability to the contrary, a "high-level" theory will blow your complexity budget.
They can deny this to their heart's content, but the mind treats words as nodes in a Bayesian causal graph. Using words such as "emergent" is enough to shift the frame of the debate from "let's explain consciousness!" to "let's explain emergence! er, um... never mind that". This seems extremely pernicious.
I am at a point where I can see little useful to say. First: I disagree with every sentence in your comment that is not (a) "See also my reply to thomblake above" or (b) a direct quote from me. Second, it appears to me that there is a large inferential distance between us - large enough that I would expect an entire sequence would be required to bridge it. (I would have expected the MAtMQ sequence to do so, but there is evidently something else not addressed there.)
Do you want to continue the discussion, knowing that the only models we can expect to improve are our models of each other?