Third, why is anything conscious? In other words, is there some deep undiscovered explanation for why clumps of matter can be conscious, or is this just an unexplainable brute fact about the way the world works?
Funny - just thought of conscious as a state that is temporal versus a trait that you are for the first time since starting to read this book. Of course it is a state in the way we are defining it.
That brings up something though - it is just something we're defining and we can be a bit arbitrary. The universe doesn't give a shit about our words and definitions.
