[austintorn@aol.com]

Consciousness is an emergent property of large numbers of neuron firing within the brain, which seems baffling to reductionists, but it seems to be so. A single neuron cannot be conscious.

Emergence is the notion that something is more that the sum of its parts. Strong emergence has downward causation; weak emergence only appears to have.

A single molecule of water is not wet; larger numbers are (perhaps due to the slipperiness of hydrogen moving around).

Macroscopic irreversibility is an emergent property of large numbers of molecules.

The subconscious presents consciousness with a frame of observation every 10/44ths of a second, although time can seem to speed up or slow down due to other factors.

Memory reconstructs the past. Vision predicts the future through imagination’s anticipation.

If I get Nobody’s theory correctly, all possible descriptions already exist “out there”, for what else could the timeless-formless do, the sum of which carries no information at all, everything being the same as nothing, just as Borge’s library of all possible book variations would be worthless information (a catalog entry would have to be the book itself).

Anything and everything has already happened, but is presented time-dilated by the subconscious. Our downward causation may give us some “choice”.