Consciousness and Emergence by Patrick Phillips
A murmuration of starlings—complex patterns emerging from local interactions
Posted on February 4, 2026
A popular view is that consciousness arises from complex networks—sometimes limited to biological neural networks, sometimes extended to more general complex processes. My uncle recently reached out after discovering this blog, and his question about emergence inspired this post:
"I've been persuaded by the idea that consciousness is an emergent property arising from the complex network of individual neurons operating in the brain, an emergent property like the intricate flight behavior of a flock, murmuration, of starlings arises to something more than the sum of its independent parts, or a tornado with respect to all of its component particles. The mind is an emergent property of the brain in other words."
This view usually falls into the physicalist perspective—the idea that everything that exists is ultimately physical, and consciousness is no exception. On this view, consciousness is what you get when physical matter is arranged in sufficiently complex ways. It's a compelling intuition, and it's worth exploring where it fits into the landscape of theories about consciousness.
The Hard Problem
The physicalist, however, generally struggles to address the hard problem of consciousness. Complex combinations of physical matter undeniably give rise to complicated behaviors and phenomena: patterns of flocks of birds, tornadoes, and even human behavior. In principle, the laws of physics can explain these higher-level complex behaviors—including everything a human does. But here's the puzzle: even after we've explained why all the physical stuff is moving the way it does—even in our brains—it doesn't seem like we have an explanation of why it feels like something to be that brain.
The Hot Stove Example
To illustrate, consider what happens when a child puts their hand on a hot stove and immediately pulls it away:
- Heat activates nociceptors (pain receptors) in the child's skin
- Nociceptors send electrical signals via C-fibers and A-delta fibers up to the spinal cord
- A reflex arc triggers motor neurons at the spinal cord (this happens before the signal even reaches the brain—that's why reflexes are so fast)
- Motor neurons cause muscle contraction, pulling the hand away
- The signal continues to the brain, where it's processed in the thalamus, somatosensory cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, etc.
- The brain rewires—synaptic connections strengthen, associating "that stove" with the nociceptor signal pattern, making the child more likely to avoid it in the future
Notice what's absent from this explanation: first-person experience. The child pulls their hand away. The child learns to avoid stoves in the future. All explained by neurons, signals, reflexes, and synaptic rewiring. No mention of what it feels like needed.
The physical story is complete (or can be made complete). And yet... there's clearly something it's like to feel that burn.
Physicalist Attempts at a Solution
Here are a couple popular theories among physicalists:
Identity Theory
Conscious states are brain states. Pain just is C-fibers firing (or whatever the neuroscience turns out to be). There's no separate mental thing—the mental and physical are identical, just described differently.
Illusionism
Consciousness seems mysterious, but that's an illusion. There's no "hard problem"—just a cognitive glitch that makes us think there's something more than physical processing. Explaining why we think and say there's felt experience is enough.
I think these theories, as well as most physicalist theories, still fail to address the question of why we feel anything. But plenty of smart people buy into them, and they deserve serious consideration.
Weak vs. Strong Emergence
The intution that some systems are "more than the sum of its parts" is interesting and worth unpacking. There are two ways to interpret this:
Weak Emergence
Is this the way that a GPU in a computer seems like a relatively simple thing and yet is able to produce the intricate, complex behaviors of displaying graphics—or running neural networks that generate text and images as well as (or better than) humans can? All of this is well-understood by physics. The "emergence" here is just the appearance of complex behavior from simple underlying rules. Nothing mysterious is happening—it's just hard to predict the macro behavior from the micro rules.
Strong Emergence
Or is it saying that literally more than physics tells us should happen—we're getting something on top of that? Strong emergence would mean that new properties arise that cannot, even in principle, be derived from or predicted by the underlying physical processes.
Where Does This Leave Us?
So if you're drawn to the view that consciousness emerges from complex networks, you're in good company. But I'd encourage you to ask: which kind of emergence? (The emergence view usually falls into physicalism—unless you buy into some form of strong emergence.)
I think the weak emergence view fails to bring consciousness into the picture anywhere. No matter how complex the system, if it's just physics all the way down, we still haven't explained why there's an inner experience. You're essentially a physicalist, and you'll need to grapple with the hard problem: why does all that complex processing feel like anything?
The strong emergence view seems like it would have to be kind of "magical"—positing that new fundamental properties pop into existence at certain levels of complexity, without any deeper explanation. You'll need to explain how and why consciousness "pops into existence" at a certain threshold of complexity. But I think it at least takes seriously our first-person experience—it acknowledges that consciousness might be something that can't be reduced to or predicted from the physical facts alone.
My own view, as I've discussed in posts on Russellian Monism and consciousness more broadly, is that we might need to take consciousness as fundamental in some sense—not something that emerges from non-conscious stuff, but something that's been there all along, perhaps as the intrinsic nature of matter itself.