Exactly - consciousness is clearly an emergent phenomena of these kinds (and possibly other kinds) of interactions in your brain due to the large scale.
In order to reason about the emergent phenomena, you have to "zoom out" - look at bigger pieces, not the individual atoms or neurons.
The tricky part here is that it seems that there is no particular reason for the bigger pieces to be separated into easy to reason about "modules". It could of course be the case, but I don't really see the evolutionary advantage between a "mess of wires" that works well enough and a system that is modularised.
So, if the brain is a modularised system, then there is hope of understanding it, as you can understand a computer that another commenter mentioned as well.
But, if not, then it might be the case that indeed a human brain will not be able to understand it by itself. If there is an underlying structure that's just intermixed with the other parts, then perhaps with the help of computers we can separate them logically.
There is of course the possibility that modularisation is simply not possible, because of (almost) full connectedness and interactions. Mr Penrose for example suggests the case of quantum entanglement leading to consciousness and if that really is the case, then there is essentially no way to "understand" why a certain decision was reached by the brain.
In order to reason about the emergent phenomena, you have to "zoom out" - look at bigger pieces, not the individual atoms or neurons.
The tricky part here is that it seems that there is no particular reason for the bigger pieces to be separated into easy to reason about "modules". It could of course be the case, but I don't really see the evolutionary advantage between a "mess of wires" that works well enough and a system that is modularised.
So, if the brain is a modularised system, then there is hope of understanding it, as you can understand a computer that another commenter mentioned as well.
But, if not, then it might be the case that indeed a human brain will not be able to understand it by itself. If there is an underlying structure that's just intermixed with the other parts, then perhaps with the help of computers we can separate them logically.
There is of course the possibility that modularisation is simply not possible, because of (almost) full connectedness and interactions. Mr Penrose for example suggests the case of quantum entanglement leading to consciousness and if that really is the case, then there is essentially no way to "understand" why a certain decision was reached by the brain.