Today, consciousness is considered an emergent property or quale of certain neural processes or if you like the brain. We could even say that consciousness is an emergent property of a living body and doesn't exist where there are no bodies or the body is no longer alive. But this argument has some problems.
Can we say of the warm water in our tea cup, heat is an emergent property of this water? We cannot. The same applies with metal. If metal feels warm or cold to the touch, that warmth or coldness is not the property of metal. Neither water nor metal have the internal capacity to produce warmth or coldness.
Now if heat is found in a living human being, we can say that heat is an emergent property of a human body in the same way locomotion is and vocal sounds. No one doubts this. But where is the determinate object called consciousness? It is not like heat or vocal sounds or someone running on the sidewalk, all this arising from a human body.
Consciousness, it should be pointed out, is something quite subjective. The definition of consciousness as being the faculty of being conscious is, to be sure, quite notionless. Even the word “conscious” is almost notionless as in “knowing secret human thoughts” or “perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought.”
Consciousness might be something entirely different than we have been taught to believe. It might be something, for example, like space or time but in the form of a universal biotic or life force or even the emergent property of this force. It might even be closer to the idea of Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, in fact.
It is fair to say that it is still inconclusive that consciousness is an emergent property of the body or the brain since, for one thing, it can't be detected directly like heat or sound requiring, instead, an ingenious use of the English language to give it meaning.
It is an old argument that consciousness emerges from bodies and by implication, brains. In the Indian school of materialism (Cârvâka) consciousness is considered to be a quale of the body since it always exists when a body is present and doesn't when there is no such body. Such arguments, however, are not that convincing. The Indian mind was not stupid. There is no evidence of which I am aware that either Jains or Buddhists took the materialist position with regard to consciousness. For Buddhists, consciousness was transitive and nonlocal which could, through desire, localize itself during conception as when the male’s sperm joins the woman’s egg. The idea that consciousness is the property or quale of certain neural processes might have been laughed at by the Buddha who had an entirely different view of reality than our modern day materialists.
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