If you can notice when you're confused, how do you notice when you're ignorant?
Have you noticed when YOU are confused?
1) The universe is a unified, consistent whole. Good!
"Good"? What does the statement even mean? What would be an alternative? non-unified whole? unified parts? non-unified bits and pieces? How would you tell?
2) The universe contains the experience/existence of consciousness. Easily observable.
Depends on your definition of consciousness. Is it one of the qualia? An outcome on the mirror test? Something else? If it's a quale, do qualia exist in the same way physical things do? The statement above is meaningless without specifying the details.
3) If consciousness exists, something in the universe must cause or give rise to consciousness. Good reasoning!
Eh, bad reasoning. Depends on the definition of "cause", which is more logic than physics. Causality in physics is merely a property of a certain set of the equations of motion, which is probably not what is meant in the above quote.
4) "Emergence" is a non-explanation, so that can't be it. Good!
Bad. Emergence "as a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties" does not necessarily imply irreducibility, so even if we can reduce humans to quarks, humans can have properties which quarks don't. Anyway, I grant this one if it means "everything is reducible" and nothing more. Of course, the reduced constituents are not required to have all the properties of the whole.
5) Therefore, whatever stuff the unified universe is made of must be giving rise to consciousness in a nonemergent way.
Presumably this means "in a non-dualist way", i.e. a complex enough optimizer is not granted consciousness by some irreducible entity.
6) Therefore, the stuff must be innately "mindy".
To argue against it, you don't need "the computational theory of mind and consciousness", just note that, say, atoms are not innately solid or liquid, so some properties of complex systems are meaningless when applied to its constituents.
Of course, maybe I am the one who is confused and not noticing it...
"Emergence" means different things to different people. Yep, this is an argument about definitions...
So I just wound up in a debate with someone over on Reddit about the value of conventional academic philosophy. He linked me to a book review, in which both the review and the book are absolutely godawful. That is, the author (and the reviewer following him) start with ontological monism (the universe only contains a single kind of Stuff: mass-energy), adds in the experience of consciousness, reasons deftly that emergence is a load of crap... and then arrives to the conclusion of panpsychism.
WAIT HOLD ON, DON'T FLAME YET!
Of course panpsychism is bunk. I would be embarrassed to be caught upholding it, given the evidence I currently have, but what I want to talk about is the logic being followed.
1) The universe is a unified, consistent whole. Good!
2) The universe contains the experience/existence of consciousness. Easily observable.
3) If consciousness exists, something in the universe must cause or give rise to consciousness. Good reasoning!
4) "Emergence" is a non-explanation, so that can't be it. Good!
5) Therefore, whatever stuff the unified universe is made of must be giving rise to consciousness in a nonemergent way.
6) Therefore, the stuff must be innately "mindy".
What went wrong in steps (5) and (6)? The man was actually reasoning more-or-less correctly! Given the universe he lived in, and the impossibility of emergence, he reallocated his probability mass to the remaining answer. When he had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however low its prior, must be true.
The problem was, he eliminated the impossible, but left open a huge vast space of possible hypotheses that he didn't know about (but which we do): the most common of these is the computational theory of mind and consciousness, which says that we are made of cognitive algorithms. A Solomonoff Inducer can just go on to the next length of bit-strings describing Turing machines, but we can't.
Now, I can spot the flaw in the reasoning here. What frightens me is: what if I'm presented with some similar argument, and I can't spot the flaw? What if, instead, I just neatly and stupidly reallocate my belief to what seems to me to be the only available alternative, while failing to go out and look for alternatives I don't already know about? Notably, it seems like expected evidence is conserved, but expecting to locate new hypotheses means I should be reducing my certainty about all currently-available hypotheses now to have some for dividing between the new possibilities.
If you can notice when you're confused, how do you notice when you're ignorant?