It gets queasy because its brains talking about brains, but analogies not involving the thinker thinking about itself never seem to cause any queasiness when an aggregate property establishes itself.
So where is the strength of an iron I-beam? You can't cut it up and squeeze "strength juice" out of it. There's no little piece you can look at that says, "hey, I'm Euler's column law!". No individual atom decided, hey, I'm an I-beam now. But if you pile up an enormous number of iron (and other) atoms in the shape of an I-beam it inevitably behaves like a beam (or column) and suddenly "knows" its supposed to have angular momentum and collapse at a certain compression force and such. There's no particular magic to it, it just naturally happens to enormous numbers of iron atoms in a small place.
About the same with stellar formation. There's no "essence of star" and no individual hydrogen atom decided to create a star. Just pile up a certain ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms and good luck not having it turn into a star. And not enough atoms, well no way it'll ignite, at least not naturally. It can kinda smolder at most.
There are other analogies with grains of sand and landslides, water crystals and avalanches, etc.
Any time you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness. We've run a couple billion experiments for quite a few centuries and every time you do it, aside from physical brain damage, it works.
Now stuff like Jaynes "Origin of the bicameral mind" is a little controversial, but, perhaps, a great big pile of neurons can boot up in a peculiar mode, sort of.
The specific hack of where it came from is only our species was able to add substantial amounts of fish to the diet, and fish oils and proteins seem to allow serious spectacular brain development in a positive feedback cycle until you get consciousness, then you overfish your ocean till all the fish die, then ... we're about to find out what comes after that.
Oh yeah, I'm very interested in historical circumstances and matter combinations that have seemingly given rise to consciousness.
But saying "[when] you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness" is begging the question. What is consciousness. What is it in the neurons that makes it? What is it about the universe we're in that allows for the phenomenon to emerge from it? This has always been how science has explained it to date: it just emerges from the complexity. But that doesn't explain anything >:|
You may want to look into physics and how a bulk property like "moment of inertia" kinda comes into being. Its a property of solid matter that kind of appears out of nothing.
Here's another fun topic to google. There's an island and a population of predator and their prey. Now graph those populations and you get some interesting oscillators. Where do those waveforms come from? Well, nowhere. Its a system thing there are no waveform particles or whatever.
Edited to add, maybe another way to say it is its not the emergence or "where" or "source" that doesn't exist, but the property itself that doesn't exist. There is no consciousness. There are just certain patterns that are really common among big piles of neurons. Like the big pile of neurons occasionally saying stuff like "I think therefore I am".
There is no consciousness to measure, or you could give it a number. I've got 100 consciousness score, how bout you? This is very much like intelligence. I know it when I see it, but you really kick over an anthill when you claim you can give out an "intelligence number" like an IQ. Coincidentally both seem to be self organizational, again all you need is a big pile of neurons and some time and not only does consciousness pop out, but so does intelligence.
So where is the strength of an iron I-beam? You can't cut it up and squeeze "strength juice" out of it. There's no little piece you can look at that says, "hey, I'm Euler's column law!". No individual atom decided, hey, I'm an I-beam now. But if you pile up an enormous number of iron (and other) atoms in the shape of an I-beam it inevitably behaves like a beam (or column) and suddenly "knows" its supposed to have angular momentum and collapse at a certain compression force and such. There's no particular magic to it, it just naturally happens to enormous numbers of iron atoms in a small place.
About the same with stellar formation. There's no "essence of star" and no individual hydrogen atom decided to create a star. Just pile up a certain ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms and good luck not having it turn into a star. And not enough atoms, well no way it'll ignite, at least not naturally. It can kinda smolder at most.
There are other analogies with grains of sand and landslides, water crystals and avalanches, etc.
Any time you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness. We've run a couple billion experiments for quite a few centuries and every time you do it, aside from physical brain damage, it works.
Now stuff like Jaynes "Origin of the bicameral mind" is a little controversial, but, perhaps, a great big pile of neurons can boot up in a peculiar mode, sort of.
The specific hack of where it came from is only our species was able to add substantial amounts of fish to the diet, and fish oils and proteins seem to allow serious spectacular brain development in a positive feedback cycle until you get consciousness, then you overfish your ocean till all the fish die, then ... we're about to find out what comes after that.