Dialog with a Materialist

Part of an ongoing conversation:

Jordan 176 (quoting me) writes:

1. If reductionist materialism is true, all reality is unselfaware matter in motion.

Self-awareness is a property of sufficiently complex information-processing systems. The system as a whole is self-aware, though this property does not inhere in the elements. This is called an "emergent property." Emergent properties were unknown to the Ancients, but they are common to many sorts of complex systems; for instance, the physics of gas