My philosophy/epistemology holds that the word "emergent" can be replaced with "reducible" with no loss of meaning. People try to sneak in anti-reductionist ideas with the concept of emergence, so what I usually do is replace the word as I'm reading and see if it still makes sense.
Yes. That is also my view. Except that "reducible" carries with it the view from below, often with the goal of explaining or deriving the macroscopic behavior (and often with the implied valuation that the macroscopic effects have no merit of their own) whereas "emergent" carries with it the view from above, where the interplay on the macroscopic level has merit and is of interest of its own.
In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.