Bhagwad Jal Park

@CriglCragl If absolutely everyone saw pink unicorns and admitted it, then I think science would need to explain pink unicorns.

@CriglCragl I know exactly what the "invisible pink unicorn" is. And if every human on earth (without exception) saw them all around, it would be a valid subject for science. The problem with the unicorns is that not everyone sees them.

@gardenhead I like the example you gave of life. And a lot depends on how we define "life".Is there any fundamental difference between "living" and "non-living" beings? I'm not so sure. I think however, there is a clear distinction between conscious and non-conscious entities. As for other things like temperature etc, those emergent phenomenon can be fundamentally explained by particles bumping into each other (colonies, cells etc).

@AmeetSharma That's a nice way of putting it. Thanks! However, we might already have reached this new stage with things like "Information is physical". I have no idea how this can evolve, but it's the start of something, maybe?

@alephzero But what if everyone (including yourself) claimed they saw invisible unicorns? (well, technically not invisible, otherwise you couldn't see them).

@xLeitix Could we really "do the same" for consciousness? Granted, my hand-waving is spectacular indeed. But even with this impressive amount of hand-waving, do we know that consciousness is "just" particles bumping into each other? Because with economics and biology, it really is particles bumping into each other!

@Conifold Which SE would you suggest is an appropriate place?

@Conifold Ideally, I want a physicist's take on this, but the problem was removed from the physics SE board, and this is the only forum I could find into which I could fit my question.

@JKusin I checked out Max Tegmark. However, he appears to have written a paper positing that consciousness is a 5th state of matter. He doesn't appear to think that consciousness is for psychologists and biologists! arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

@Sandejo Because we don't have the computing power to solve biology. So we need shortcuts and approximations. With a powerful enough computer, we could wipe out all sciences other than physics. The "easily explained" refers to the fact that all biology is ultimately particles interacting. I don't mean to say that the equations are easily solvable. Only that it's easy to understand why biology is basically just physics.

Physics can explain everything "in principle". We're not all rich because we can't compute the outcome of the laws of physics. But there's nothing mysterious going on. Economics -> People -> Cells -> Molecules -> Particles -> Physics. As Feynman said "The Universe is not complicated, there’s just a lot of it". The problem with consciousness is that it's an emergent phenomena that can't be explained even in principle, unlike biology which is easily explained in principle by physics, since all biological matter is made up of particles.