blacktrance comments on Neural Categories - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 February 2008 12:33AM

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Comment author: blacktrance 13 December 2013 06:16:44PM 2 points [-]

Emergence isn't helpful by itself, but it is helpful in context. For example, if you say that consciousness is emergent from neurons firing, it doesn't describe how it does it, but it does exclude other positions - "Consciousness doesn't exist", "Consciousness is a basic feature of the world and doesn't emerge from anything, it's just there", and "Consciousness emerges from something other than neurons".