The only evidence is that most people can agree that creatures who have brains are the ones that definitely display consciousness.
This is true regardless of how you define consciousness.
As you expand your notion of consciousness, fewer and fewer people will agree with you. A lot of people doubt that certain simple animals are ‘conscious’. Still more people doubt that plants are conscious. And even more people would consider ridiculous the suggestion that non-living objects are conscious. (I don’t know of any survey, but I expect that this general distribution of opinions will hold in most societies with a western-style education.)
This ‘social’ evidence might not seem adequate, but it’s all we have, because we can’t seem to agree on what consciousness is, or how to define it from a scientific perspective.
In my personal opinion consciousness cannot be defined scientifically, and will never be, because it not a scientific concept. This does not mean that I think consciousness does not ‘exist’. It only means that science has limitations: science studies objectivephenomena, and consciousness as far as I can tell is irreducibly subjective.
I’m in no way a neuroscientist or anything like that, but I research a lot about it and I would like to share my thoughts on this.
The answer - while there is no DEFINITE scientific evidence that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, and there likely never will be any definite evidence regarding this, there are definitely loads and loads of HIGHLY SUGGESTIVE evidence that suggest that that’s indeed the case.
The most common form of such highly suggestive evidence is functional neuroimaging.
Since the invention of functional neuroimaging neuroscientists have been observing the activity of the brains of various people and they kept coming to the same conclusion over and over again and that is - for almost every thought the brain scan subjects make, emotion they feel, or almost every mental/physical action they take, that has been recorded so far by brain scanners, there is a corresponding, distinct-enough, biochemical reaction in the brain.
As the sensitivity and resolution of the brain scanners improve over time, we will probably be able to see more and more of those currently obscure or “invisible” activity changes, and in turn, at some point understand the human brain and the nature of many mental issues/illnesses much better than now.
Like I said, that is a highly suggestive evidence and not THE DEFINITE one obviously, because we don’t know if there perhaps is such a thing as some kind of force that may run parallel to our brain activity that we are completely unaware of and unable to detect with any of our instruments.
That was just my opinion.
There isn’t any evidence as such; as Craig Weiler points out, the correlation between brain activity and inner experience could also be evidence for various other models of how the brain works.
I think most people who say that “consciousness is an emergent property of the brain” only mean that consciousness is created by the brain, plus they may also be trying to say that they don’t think emotion and inner experience require any special explanation, other than existing physics.
This is arguably a misuse of the word “emergent”. We say that a tornado is an emergent property of air molecules, because tornados are just our word for how a bunch of air molecules sometimes behave when put together.
We generally don’t say that gravity is an emergent property of matter, because gravity (we generally think) is not a pattern that emerges when some matter is put together; we regard gravity as a fundamentally additional phenomenon that arises from matter. It’s not just a word that we use to sum up the expected behaviour of matter — or at least, that’s not how we normally think of it.
So then in considering consciousness, there are two aspects to it and only one could be said to be emergent.
On the one hand there’s everything the brain does physically (leading to human behaviour), and that could be said to be an emergent property of brain cells or whatever.
But there’s also the existence of this inner experience, including emotion and “qualia” and what-not; this is additional and unexpected, and is not predicted by physics. It only seems normal because we’re used to it. It only makes sense to call this “emergent” if you feel that there is no separate phenomenon there to be explained.
Funny thing: Any evidence that you can use to prove the consciousness is emergent you can also use to prove that consciousness is not emergent. The central issue here is that if consciousness is a kind of signal and the brain a receiver, the evidence will still look the same.
The most common analogy to explain this is a TV. The picture on the TV is obviously not an emergent property of the TV.
Here is a degraded picture from a TV. The signal is weak. Now we know that there is no problem with the signal, the problem lies with the ability of the TV to display it. A different TV closer to the source will display the picture perfectly. If the TV is damaged the signal won’t display properly. But this has nothing to do with the signal.
So you can see that if you view consciousness as a signal that the brain taps into and uses, then you get the same data that you would if consciousness was an emergent property.
Emergence is assumed by the scientific community, but that’s all it is. An assumption.
And to add more confusion to the issue, no one has the slightest idea how emergence would work. This is called the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Experience, emotion and thought are not things and no one can show how they could possibly arise from matter.
To me this seems like an assertion in an attempt to answer the hard problem of consciousness without really answering it.
“X is an emergent property” is often code for I don’t know, but it looks connected or associated with some physical properties.
Thats a way to seem like someone is explaining something, but not explaining it really in the least.
Plus it doesn’t answer all the important things that minds do and how they are distinct. It also doesn’t answer the core critiques of the materialist ideology.
Thats like saying confidence or victory is an emergent property of football quarterbacks.
Or that trees are emergent properties of planets (based on the evidence we’ve seen from earth.)
Re-describing reality in physical terms doesn’t make reality physicalist only in nature. Thats just language games.
The biggest evidence:
- When you hurt the brain, you hurt the consciousness.
- When you drug the brain, you impair the consciousness.
- When the brain is sick, the consciousness is affected.
- When the brain is malnourished, the consciousness is starved.
- When the brain is excited or active in certain ways, the consciousness responds in a repeatable and testable pattern.
These patterns are repeatable. Two people coming into the ER with similar brain injuries will have similar effects to their consciousness.
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