>>12814473Once upon the time, we had the same question about life. We had chemistry first. We knew that if you burned everything, we could find every element in a living organism and quantify it. Those ashes would never spontaneously go back the other direction. But we also knew that living things could take them in and transform them into more living matter. It was super weird. So there were people back then postulating some mysterious life force (odic force) or extra element or who knows what that drove dumb matter into being alive.
But chemistry got better, and eventually we discovered DNA, and although we don't understand every process in life we've got a pretty good handle about how it does its thing in general, no mysterious force needed. Just evolution and chemistry.
Honestly, I see consciousness and think "There is nothing in chemistry or physics that has this property, it must be something else." But people have been wrong about that before, and it may yet turn out to be some emergent property of information processing or something, no magic required.
