this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Most people don't, unfortunately.
How do you define consciousness? How do you define "you"?
I believe that consciousness is simply an emergent property of our brain. Without the brain, there is no consciousness. A brain can be destroyed, just like a hard drive can be destroyed. Sure, the atoms are still there, but the "you" inside of them is as good as gone.
The problem with Emergentism is that it doesn't really have evidence beyond throwing our hands up and going "We can't find anything in there that causes it but we see there's conciousness. So... it just emerges somehow"
It's just "spontaneous generation" (what people believed before Germ Theory) for the brain. It's very "God of the Gaps" in a way.
I'd sooner put stock into the Orch-OR theory than take emergentism too seriously.
It's not similar to "god of the gaps" at all, as I'm not inserting anything inside of that gap. I have no fucking clue what's causing it to emerge, and I probably never will. Rather than saying "I don't know what's causing lightning so it must be Zeus," I'm saying "I don't know what's causing lightning, but I can see it's coming from the sky." Or in this case, I have no idea what's causing us to experience consciousness, but it seems to be a result of our brain.
And I see no evidence for the idea that consciousness can even exist outside of the brain, nor that an afterlife exists.
As far as I see there are correlations with the brain, but until I see a smoking gun I don't feel it appropriate to say causation.
However I don't think anyone out there, even the most diehard believer in whatever mysticism you fancy would go as far as to say there aren't correlations.
That said correlations appear to be all there are.
Edited for clarity