I am told that conscious awareness is an emergent property of physical reactions.
Ok.
Emergent properties are determined by physical reactions...
Not inherently - you could have an emergent behaviour from some other interactions, but you'd need to show that such interactions were happening.
...and in the physical model there is no mechanism for the emergent property of conscious awareness to have any influence over the reactions from which it emerges.
Uh... why? Where does this understanding come from? If consciousness is an emergent property of physical actions, it becomes another cause which can have measurable and consistent effects, there's nothing in the nature of emergent properties that somehow excludes them from this.
This reduces the property of conscious awareness to be just a spectator of the consequences to the reactions from which it emerges.
It's not the idea that it's an emergent behaviour that does this, it's the nature of cause and effect. If you want to break out of this model then you need to explain in what way consciousness - whether physical or not - transcends the cause and effect model of activity.
So in this scenario, the emergent property of conscious awareness can give no survival advantage to the physically determined model from which it emerges, which puts into question how or why the property of conscious awareness came into existence within the evolutionary process.
OK, so wrong on both parts. Consciousness as an emergent property arises because of the interaction of other evolved traits which themselves provided a survival or reproductive benefit at some point. Since then, the action of consciousness on our behaviour has changed the way we operate such that it subsequently has provided us with a competitive advantage against other animals in our ecosystems.
The reality we perceive, however, indicates a much different role for conscious awareness in which there is a two way exchange of information between conscious awareness and the material brain.
Nothing in the physical model of consciousness or the idea that consciousness is an emergent property restricts the activity of consciousness to a one-way flow of data or information - indeed, feedback loops are intrinsic to the modern understanding of consciousness and brain activity in general. That these individual neuronal activities occur faster than conscious thought, and 'behind the scenes' as it were, means that our perception of them isn't a reliable guide to what's actually going on. In evolutionary terms, it's outside of the activity range our brains have evolved to deal with, and so we have to be at least sceptical of our instinctive impressions.
For example our ability to consciously invoke and control the thought processes needed to derive and verify logical analyses and draw viable conclusions requires more than just a spectator role.
Except that the fact you FEEL like 'you' are in control doesn't mean that's actually the case when you look at the architecture and the biophysics.
As indicated above, there is no mechanism in the physical model for conscious awareness to operate this two way exchange of information, leading to a conclusion that in reality, conscious awareness comprises more than just an emergent property of physical reactions.
No, it wasn't 'indicated' it was asserted, and wrongly asserted at that.
None of which addresses the fundamental flaw you have in the conception that you're attempting to put forward as an alternative: what's the third path between/around deterministic activity and random activity which frees consciousness from absolute dependence upon prior events whilst maintaining a non-random nature in order to constitute will?
O.
