Depends on what is meant by ‘emergence’. If you mean to say that ‘emergence’ itself is “mysterious” then I would disagree. Chemistry is ‘emergent’ from physics—molecules possess attributes that their constituent atoms do not—but no one would describe this as “mysterious”. It’s simply a question of scale.
Consciousness described as being ‘emergent’ from our neuroanatomy is hardly a ‘mysterious’ statement: it’s simply a claim of “scale”. One would not examine the exact behaviors of every atom in a molecule to predict its characteristics: no matter how much oxygen or hydrogen you have at room temperature the characteristic of “wet” would never be noted. Only dihydrogen oxide at room temperature (and in sufficiently significant quantities) has that characteristic. So too, potentially, is it with consciousness: while yes it is necessary to understand the workings of the constituent parts it is only by observing how they interact as a whole that consciousness can be comprehended—in much the same way we would not discuss the phenotype of E.coli in terms of their spacetime tensor coordinates.
Depends on what is meant by ‘emergence’. If you mean to say that ‘emergence’ itself is “mysterious” then I would disagree. Chemistry is ‘emergent’ from physics—molecules possess attributes that their constituent atoms do not—but no one would describe this as “mysterious”. It’s simply a question of scale.
Consciousness described as being ‘emergent’ from our neuroanatomy is hardly a ‘mysterious’ statement: it’s simply a claim of “scale”. One would not examine the exact behaviors of every atom in a molecule to predict its characteristics: no matter how much oxygen or hydrogen you have at room temperature the characteristic of “wet” would never be noted. Only dihydrogen oxide at room temperature (and in sufficiently significant quantities) has that characteristic. So too, potentially, is it with consciousness: while yes it is necessary to understand the workings of the constituent parts it is only by observing how they interact as a whole that consciousness can be comprehended—in much the same way we would not discuss the phenotype of E.coli in terms of their spacetime tensor coordinates.
But I digress.