[argimenes]

"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that?"

Another way of phrasing it which highlights the fallacy is:

"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re alive. But if you’re just made of non-alive matter, why and how exactly could life arise from that?"

Just because we don't know exactly how life arose from non-biotic matter doesn't mean that non-biotic matter is alive. And just because we don't know how consciousness arose, exactly, doesn't mean that all matter is conscious.

[mistermann]

Similarly, injecting the word "just" into a description of the problem space doesn't make it true, though at scale it can make it seem that way.

[llamaimperative]

Eh, not really. There are things all along the alive-dead spectrum. “Life” is readily explained as, essentially, chemical reactions. There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things.

The original emergence of life is rather mysterious/special, but the mechanics of how it now propagates out of “dead” matter is not.

This is not true of consciousness. We cannot find any evidence of anything in particular that would “turn the lights on” in matter that didn’t previously have the lights turned on.

[ASalazarMX]

We are just monkeys trying to explain the universe and failing miserably because we're not smart enough to understand it at the basic level. Having failed repeatedly, some monkeys declare it mysterious and unknowable because they are too proud to embrace our limitations.

That we are not able to understand how, doesn't prove that life and consciousness arise from anything besides physics. Magic doesn't exist.

I'm not foreign to the irony of a dumb monkey declaring something doesn't exist, but I think it's been overwhelmingly clear through the ages that magic never has had any direct effect outside our imaginations.

[bubblyworld]

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I also think it's a little bit premature to say that life is readily explained as chemical reactions. For instance, ecologists study natural selection (i.e. the dynamics of life as we know it) at a much higher level than that, and for good reason! We really don't know how to reduce high-level aspects of behaviour down to matter and interaction yet - not even close.

Biology is the ultimate spaghetti code - there are causal loops between all the layers of abstraction (I guess as a result of enormous optimisation pressure and lots of time). I think that makes full-scale reductionism like you're describing a bit hopeless.

[mapcars]

> There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things.

There are myriads of things you can't explain about life in any terms. Just that you did not go deep enough to experience them.

[yzydserd]

Like, a strawberry?