> It seems to me you are trying really hard to make it seem like I'm uncomfortable on a personal or emotional level with the concept that consciousness can arise from matter only; please belive me when I say I am not. But on an intellectual and rational level I find the idea untenable. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept for you?

Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."

If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property. And the emerging properties are seldom "intuitive" and all appear to us "unlike anything else in the universe" until we simply use enough computation to reproduce them.

If you are aware of the history of human understanding of the movements of planets you would know that even these simple paths were before seen "unlike anything else in the universe": we didn't know how anything can continue to move so, and before Galileo we didn't even know that anything could not circle the Earth -- note the Earth being completely "special" in that understanding. Then, only better measurements helped us see the truth: Galileo discovering moons circling around other planets (making our Moon not special) and proving that the circular motion around other planets exists. Tycho Brache more accurately measuring the movements of the planets, and Kepler recognizing that all the paths can be seen as ellipsoid once we accept Earth's non-uniqueness, but that it actually moves around the Sun. Note: only to come to that conclusion, Kepler needed the huge amount of precise measurements that nobody before him had! And he had to perform for that time immense number of calculations, something that was certainly out of reach to 99.9999999999% (I'm not sure about the number of nines) of the human population at that moment, especially out of reach even to those who were rich enough and knowledgeable enough to perform them, but who would still not be even willing to spend so much time of their life on that topic unless they were ready to accept that the Earth doesn't have to be special in being a center of the universe.

And finally, even after that unique amount of measurements and calculations, it was still not answerable to anybody what is moving the planets in that ellipsoid paths, that is how anything like that can "arise" from anything we "subjectively knew." That is, anybody could claim exactly what you claim now.

But then came Newton, being lucky to invent a new way to speed up the calculations: the infinitesimal calculus. It was effectively a new "language" that allowed immensely more concise description of the calculations involved, which allowed him to being able to describe the movements of the planets and moons as, up until then completely different from anything anybody "subjectively knew", the continuous free fall toward the object around which they rotate.

Note: unless you studied physics, you most probably don't even know that the planets are really continuously in the "free fall" or even that exactly that is the reason why the humans, being inside of the International Space Station orbiting only 250 mi above the Earth, still can "float" inside of it. The gravitational forces are quite strong only 250 mi above the Earth, but the cause of the stuff and humans floating is their "continuous free fall"! Both the emerging properties of a single simple law.

So was that anything of "subjective experience" before first human was in orbit? Either no, or yes, but proving the opposite, depending whom you'd ask. Is it today? Yes. It it "rationally obvious" even today? Actually no, unless you are definitely able to do the computations following the physics formulas, note, that capability is important to be able to be "rational" about that. Was it possible to calculate it 300 years ago? Yes, but made easier due to the "shortcut" of the infinitesimal calculus. What is that actually? An "emerging property" of just a simple law F = G m1 x m2 / r^2

Do all computations have some nice shortcuts? Depends, but for some emerging properties you actually have to perform all the steps! Take a Jula fractal: f(z) = z^2 + c is the whole formula, and we needed so fast computers like today's to produce this (emerging properties of calculating the formula):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rMyDWoTArU

or (Mandelbrot, also the same formula):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrtGOMKrask

Please watch it, to get an idea how much can emerge from something as simple as f(z) = z^2 + c The computations needed for video are immense, we're just at the moment that we have strong enough computers to do them, record the output and speed it up enough for you to watch it in only 10 minutes. Just 100 years ago nobody would have been able to produce that output in any form.

Note: before Newton, nobody could believe it is so simple: that all the complex (and they are complex) planetary motions are an emerging property of such a simple law.

Likewise, your "subjective experience" of being special being "conscious" is an emerging property. The underlying completely materialistic laws are simple, but simply a lot of computation is needed for the property to emerge, if you want to reproduce it with our current technology.

The nature reproduces it, of course, all the time, having much smaller "building blocks", and there is a physicist who wrote:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/29/seriousl...

"Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood"

And he also wrote a whole book on the topic:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/bigpicture/