alt Hacker NewsWhy does a neuron, which is simply a cell that takes in chemicals and electricity, and shits out neurotransmitters; why does 90 billion of those give rise to human intelligence? Neurons are just next chemical state machines. We can model individual ones on a computer. Yet 90 billion of them together make up a human brain, and gives rise to consciousness and intelligence. If you get stuck on the next word prediction part, and ignore the ridiculous scale that's involved with training a model, you miss the forest for the trees.
Great progress came from inverting things that were believed to be self evident. Earth being the center of the world appear to be self evident when you look up at a night sky. But what was the truth?
Right now humans think it is self evident that physical laws give rise to consciousness. Arguments such as yours arise from this implicit assumption that premeditate all our thoughts and reasoning. But this is a dead end. Like how the earth centeric model reached a dead end and run out of steam before it can explain all the observations.
So to progress I think we should turn this down on its head and ask what if consciousness is fundamental? And the cosmos (or the experience of inhabiting one) arises from it? May be some recent advances in quantum mechanics and hypothesis like MUH are already in that direction...