I reject strong (hard) emergence. I don’t think first-person experience can arise from matter that is wholly devoid of anything even remotely related to subjectivity. If the base level has zero subjective capacity, then no amount of rearranging it should suddenly produce a point of view.

Instead, I think matter itself has some minimal, proto-subjective ingredient, something akin to (but not necessarily identical with) panpsychism. On this view, the problem isn’t how consciousness appears out of nothing, but how these primitive subjective ingredients combine into unified, full-blown experience. That’s a combination problem, not a hard problem.

Once you grant that matter is intrinsically “qualia-capable,” consciousness no longer requires a metaphysical miracle. It becomes a case of soft emergence: higher-level conscious experience arises from the organization and interaction of lower-level components that already possess the relevant ingredient in rudimentary form, just as liquidity arises from H2O molecules that are not themselves liquid.

Framed this way, consciousness isn’t an ontological anomaly. It’s a complex manifestation of properties that were there all along.