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I once heard that the only hard problem in consciousness was in explaining it to Chalmers.

It seems to me that consciousness is not an entity at all but an activity: the activity of the brain. I think a great deal of time and energy has been wasted by misclassifying an activity as a thing. It's a category error, in my opinion.

Trying to answer to @Intoscience's question 'what's your take on this?', and leaving aside the ongoing discussion based on the nonsense of spacetime being a scalar... I understand 'emergent' as a variable that's derived from relationships among more fundamental variables, and it's not present in those variables. Very much what Swansont stated. It is derived from the overall dynamics of those variables. The variable that's really bothersome, especially when trying to combine cosmology and quantum mechanics is time, not space. Because: The universe cannot be instantiated/re-instantiated There were no observers* [?] No really good explanation for initial conditions of the universe Meta-laws (laws previous to physical laws as we know them): What does 'previous' even mean? Time, in combination with QM, really seems to stand in the way of anything meaningful we might try to say in very early cosmology. It's not a practical matter for everyday physics. It's about very early cosmology. That's precisely why most prominent physicists who are concerned with cosmology support the view that spacetime, or maybe just time, is emergent. Namely: it hides something in it, so to speak; it derives from a more fundamental, structure. The three questions, time asymmetry, chiral asymmetry, and charge asymmetry in the universe must be related, as the CPT theorem of quantum field theory relates them all very clearly. If/when we find out why time is a one-way pathway, because we get to understand how it emerged that way, we will probably understand the other two. Maybe it's something completely unsuspected. Maybe instability and spontaneous breaking of symmetry are at the core of why we perceive the universe as a history, the actual underlying level being something much more symmetric, and observers only making sense as stretched over time. I'm approaching my dangerous 'push the envelope' mode. * The now popular view of measurement as decoherence between alternatives doesn't even start to tackle this problem IMO, as irrespective of whether the universe is in a mixed instead of a pure quantum state, a quantum state for the whole universe doesn't make a lot of sense, at least with the usual operational rules that go with it. This is the problem of the pointer states, can be formally swept under the carpet for anything other than the whole universe, but is clearly posed in Wheeler & Zurek.

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Thinkers who conjure a "hard problem" of consciousness, everyone from Thomas Nagel to Dave Chalmers, tend to slide into some form of property dualism. Usually of the form that something in neuronal processes is not ontologically reducible, and somehow achieves "downward causation. " The subjective "felt" aspects of experience, or "qualia," become a sort of special thing outside of scientific naturalism and physical causality - and there lies Gilbert Ryle's category error. Sean Carroll has a great blog on the pitfalls of downward causation and using the wrong sort of language to talk about physical processes. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/ For those that don't speak English, "watermelon" is almost impossible to understand or explain. Unless, of course, you have a watermelon on hand.

Maybe ask a roundworm.

I should have asked about this in my last post. What is your opinion then, on probability in the light of the general scientific requirement of reproducibility? IOW what do you think of a variable that might sometimes 'emerge' ? Secondly would you consider the Himalayan monsoon emergent from the Southern Oscillation (pressurein the West Pacific)?

Thank you for an interesting view, especially the first line. +1

Here Read this ... IntroductionLQG.pdf (univ-mrs.fr)

Robert Sawyer's "Wake" is the most plausible fiction I've encountered on this question. And it's fairly gentle on AI neophytes, introducing concepts like cellular automata and Shannon entropy without too much pain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(Sawyer_novel)

I read it. One could hope that's always true, or, when making rules, put measures in place to make sure that's always the case. But is that your best explanation to: How is your "Transition is a medical process controlled by the physician following best practices." any less vague than: Other than my clearly pointing out that it was not the only option, as did MigL. Certainly not for that reason on it's own. CY has yet to concede that with regard to transgenders. In fact he seemed appalled that we would even consider it.

If we accept (and some don't) that sentience is an emergent feature based on particular patterns of information, a computation some people would say, then why does that pattern have to occur at the transistor level? In animals it may just so happen to occur at the neuronal level because that is the first substrate that achieved a sufficient level of complexity for information processing to achieve sentience, but that does not exclude other forms of information achieving the requisite level of complexity. Inside a neural network, the strength of weights between nodes is being strengthened or weakened as learning occurs which is what could be analogous to the strengthening and weakening of neurons in a brain.

Hello. Background in life sciences, but have ranged widely into other areas including AI, cognitive science, astronomy, and cosmology. Also some interest in bioethics and philosophy of science. I was, until a month ago, the Admin of sciencechatforum.com, a website that crashed after it was bought up by a "web development" company that turned out to be running a Ponzi Scheme on its investors and was seized by the U.S. SEC. The receivership handling the liquidation of its assets could not, for reasons obscure to me, keep the website up and running. One day, we all woke up and the site was gone. ScienceForums seems to be a website with a rather similar structure and a pretty good signal/noise ratio, which suggests good moderation and tossing of trolls. Well done. This refugee from late-stage capitalism is happy to be here!

Prometheus asked if the (present) internet could be engineered to become sentient. I responded that I don't know how to, and implied that no one else at the moment does either, but perhaps someone might in the future, within a reasoable guess of a few hundred years. But that would not preclude it happening tomorrow. Like Windows 10 does already ?