problemaddict 2, You say: “The brain in the corpse does not think because is decaying matter, not a functioning brain anymore.”
However, there are people whose bodies mysteriously thwart decay. They also have brain intact. Or you take a fresh corpse of a man killed in an accident just a few seconds before. This fresh corpse (which is yet to start the process of decaying) too has brain intact! Yet consciousness is not there! Hence consciousness is not the emergent feature of the brain.
All claims of emergent consciousness are SIMPLY PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS DRESSED UP AS SCIENCE. You can poke holes in this edifice in three crucial ways, teasing apart the idea that consciousness (1) is an emergent (2) property of the brain (3). Emergent
First, “emergent property” is an oft-misused term. With respect to consciousness, it is one of those hand-wavey terms people like to throw around without any substance behind it. Used appropriately, it can refer to an incredibly useful scientific hypothesis. A basic definition is something like complex properties that result from the interaction of simple behaviors. When people talk about emergent consciousness, they show nothing of this sort and therefore don’t answer the how of consciousness. Some crucial questions that “emergence” doesn’t answer, which actual scientific emergent explanations tackle include:
How does consciousness arise from chemical interactions leading to electric impulses?
Why is there consciousness instead of something else?
How does physiology constrain and define this so-called emergent property?
The crucial thing missing here is mechanism. When we talk about real emergent properties, like those of a network, for example, we can show how a specific type of network (e.g., a Small-world network) will emerge in lots of different situations, (e.g., the brain, social networks etc.) because of simple properties that connections between things have: some sort of relationship between viability and proximity. From this, you get lots of local connections and a few non-local ones in certain proportions. Crucially, this makes sense in a mechanistic way where you can understand how the simple properties specifically gives rise to the larger organization and basically only this organization and you can model it — see it happen before your eyes. We cannot say this in the case of brain and consciousness!