This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me but if you meditate for long enough or take certain substances you can experience that the conscious experience we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear - and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can be assured of" is the experience, not the control of the experience.
This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk about that experience, which does imply some control from the observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my religious beliefs.
It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are talking about the intelligence or self awareness or thoughts then I don’t see any problem with it being emergent. But if we are talking about conscious experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts, but something that just experiences) then I think it’s incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a consciousness that is experiencing something is the only thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is dependent because something that we don’t know is true tells us it is.
This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk about that experience, which does imply some control from the observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my religious beliefs.