> Nothing can explain "everything". I'm not saying I argue for the opposite, but that is very definitive statement in need of a very strong argument to be take

> Nothing can explain "everything". I'm not saying I argue for the opposite, but that is very definitive statement in need of a very strong argument to be taken seriously. > What does that even mean? Things that we don't even know how to talk about yet, like consciousness. Even if consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon, this still doesn't explain the subjective experience of consciousness. Subjective experience might be irreducible, but it might not. We don't know yet. From what I understand, you're claiming that we can't explain higher levels of emergence in terms of lower levels. But that's not true, and your example of hardware/software is the prime example of that. We can explain or model every level of abstraction perfectly in terms of the preceding, lower level of abstraction, until we get to the quantum mechanical properties of the substrate your software is running on. Whether it's practical to talk about the rules of chess in terms of QM is another matter - it's not - but I'd maybe argue that's because we're not intelligent enough to hold enough information at once in our brains, not because of some inherent impossibility of doing so.