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Does physics truly have anything to say about consciousness?
Many, from neuroscientists to philosophers to anesthesiologists, have claimed to understand consciousness. Do physicists? Does anyone?
Every once in a while, scientists will bite off more than they can chew. Just as we normally use that phrase to mean “taking on a task that’s beyond your means to accomplish with the resources you currently have,” that same limitation applies to a wide variety of scientific problems. Whereas the fundamental laws, particles, and interactions of the Universe are exquisitely well known (up to a point), the vast array of complex, composite structures that emerge from those basic building blocks of reality often attain properties that arise in a non-obvious way from their constituent parts.
Sometimes, by simulating many-body systems and imposing the proper boundary conditions, we can indeed derive large, macroscopically observable properties from those fundamental rules; the color of a sodium lamp is one such example, the success of a coaxial cable in transmitting radio-frequency signals is another.
At other times, however, the rules are a lot more complex, and we can only state that something happens (or must happen), lacking a full understanding of how it happens. Perhaps…
