I've always maintained, well, not always, but over the past 15 years or so, that consciousness is an emergent property, also called a supervenient property.

A rock is a collection of molecules, yet it has the property of hardness. The individual molecules aren't themselves hard, but the rock is hard. Hardness is a supervening, or emergent, property of the rock.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman