What is it that gives people a consciousness?

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OK. I said "No answer. No need for an answer."

To elaborate, I truly don't feel there is a question, there. I don't think "consciousness" is a sudden "now you don't see it, now you do" transition, in the first place.

Emergent properties are just concerned with changing the language you use. Features of a system which are not immediately apparent at a "lower" level, but become much more apparent at a "higher" level.

The screen you are viewing this sentence on is displaying (maybe blurry) single pixels. You have just read that sentence without the slightest real care for that low level description. In fact, you have jumped through several level: individual photons... enough, with dissimilar energies, from small areas to give a sense of a dot, those being processed by your eye, various processing in the brain which converted patterns of dots into characters, then words, and finally a sentence. Simultaneous with the visual analyses going on in the brain, there were auditory responses being triggered, which triggered the extraction of meaning from the sentence (I hope). Somewhere up the top of all that is your consciousness, appreciating the sentence as reflexive. (It is discussing itself, if you ponder for a moment. That was actually unintentional.)

Now, I'd say that all of that is showing progressive emergence of properties that are worth having names for, and a language of description for them. The only stages that we still don't have a good language for are those final ones leading up to the emergence of consciousness.

Even the other stages only have a degree of understanding, so far. After light hits the back of the eye, and signals disappear off down the optic nerves, the pattern recognition in the brain is fairly well understood. As the signals pass on, once the primitive shapes have been recognised, the functioning of the brain becomes pretty murky, but we're getting some idea of how meaning is extracted.

Back to the question: "Why does emergence happen?". It doesn't. It's there all along. "Why is water wet?". You need to analyse what you mean by "wet". Then show why that property applies to water. There will not be a reason why water is wet. Your definition of the property "wetness" will have made it one that water happens to exhibit. It is not a property that is meaningfully going to apply to H2O molecules, except in large numbers.

I don't feel threatened by the idea that we are not the pinnacle of evolution.

I realise computers are intelligent and more able in many ways than the brain of man.

But for computers to function at all, they need the creativity and input of man.

My opinion.... I don't believe man will achieve the ability to create a machine, that raises a level of consciousness in a machine.

I don't consider myself to be a machine. There is another dimension to me, a spiritual dimension that is more (to quote slowmutant) than the sum of my parts.

Wow... amazing unconscious intelligence.

I understand your point.

ok ok im with you here, but i am unsure if i agree.

these "features" that arent apparent at a lower level arent there to start with...or are you suggesting they are there, but hidden until a sufficent level of complexity exists.

Out brains give us consciousness.

ruveyn

Here is an interesting link to toss into the discussion:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/

This one is also interesting:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0305-4470/37/26/B01

This one is very interesting as well:
http://www.mindbodysymposium.com/press-articles.html

God.

(Shouldn't this thread be in the philosophy section?)

I don't know any more than the rest of you about where consciousness comes from, but here's another perspective.

I'm insulin-dependent, and one of the necessary corollaries of that condition is the occasional dropout from consciousness that goes with minimal or non-existent blood sugar.

I've returned gradually to consciousness in a variety of contexts, and there are layers to the experience. There's "not there", there's "here", there's "I'm here", there's "Where the hell am I?" and "How do I get the hell out of here" - all of those are pre-verbal, pre-reasoning, and usually have varying percentages of terror and fight-or-flight mixed in with them. There's a particular point where context and familiarity start to flicker back on, and a later point where speech becomes possible. Usually I'm a bit monosyllabic to start with, and often hard to understand.

What I make of this is that there are quite a lot of independent systems that keep on ticking over even when consciousness is absent. The "Oh, I remember now" stage only appears at the top of a fairly complicated pyramid.

good analogy but it doesnt answer how conciousness emerges from neurons

Examine the papers from Stapp and Schwartz concerning the origin of consciousness and it would seem that it does not originate with the neuronal connections themselves.
Also latest work indicates that the 'older' brain retains a trememdous amount of plasticity and is forming new connections almost as fast as in younger people.

yes my point being that conciousness is an emergent property of the connections made between neurons.

yes my point being that conciousness is an emergent property of the connections made between neurons.

Read spome of the material. Tt seems that the exploration is towards finding the origin of consciousness in the particles that are literally in the space between neuronal connections and that it is the 'process' of how the mind functions At a quantum level more than the functioning itself that gives rise to what many call 'free will'