"Liquidity is irreducible to physical phenomonon. If we break it down to atoms and look at each atom we will see that it's not liquid. Therefore we must conclud

"Liquidity is irreducible to physical phenomonon. If we break it down to atoms and look at each atom we will see that it's not liquid. Therefore we must conclude that there are two types of matter in the world, liquid matter and non-liquid matter." Or take for example the fact that a few hundred years they couldn't figure out fire so they made up a new property (not too unlike pansychism): "In general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a finite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life. Breathing was thought to take phlogiston out of the body" The points I'm trying to make: 1. Emergent properties are real. Just saying that reducing something makes it hard to explain doesn't make that thing a magical thing. 2. History shows that it's kind of silly to invent new type of matter or properties when we fail to explain something. We have this black box that we barely know much about inside our skulls. It could be an amazing machine that generates consciousness yet before trying to reverse engineer it some of us likes to say "it's actually not that thing, it's something else that has the magic".