Regarding this comment:  "However, to say that a certain configuration of matter creates subjective experience, and on being asked "how", to say "its emergence silly" seems like clumsy science to me, or rather, a science in its infancy which is claiming more than its capable of. the hardest part in science is to formulate the right questions, and i don't think we have the right questions for the subject matter of consciousness."

Saying that consciousness is an emergent phenomena is equivalent to saying that a minimally complex brain is needed to experience consciousness.  Emergence is so ubiquitous that saying consciousness is an emergent phenomena isn't saying much.

There is a distinction between unjustified and justified speculation.  When attempting to locate the general direction where the answer most likely resides (in contexts where evidence to support a particular answer is unavailable or limited), justified speculation maintains a good fit with the available evidence while unjustified speculation breaks the constraint of fitting with the available evidence.  So, for example, the speculations of Dennett and Carroll are justified while the speculations of Chopra are unjustified. Although he is more constrained than Chopra, Chalmers is attracted to possibilities that do not fit well with empirically derived constraints.  The place where the boundary between justified and unjustified speculations is crossed can be ambiguous, and Chalmers arguably stays more within that ambiguous zone than Chopra.

> On May 20, 2016, at 12:34 AM, Don Wharton <[address removed]> wrote:
> 
> However, to say that a certain configuration of matter creates subjective experience, and on being asked "how", to say "its emergence silly" seems like clumsy science to me, or rather, a science in its infancy which is claiming more than its capable of. the hardest part in science is to formulate the right questions, and i don't think we have the right questions for the subject matter of consciousness.