I lean toward agnosticism here, because I see real merits and pitfalls on both sides. If I were clever enough, I’d try to devise an experiment that cut between them—but part of me suspects that no such experiment is possible, precisely because the conceptual frame might already bias the outcome.

I’m wary of dismissing strong emergence simply because it ‘sounds like magic.’ That response risks becoming circular: we assume everything unexplained must eventually be physically explainable, since everything explained so far has been physical. But that’s not really evidence—it’s induction edging into dogma.

This is where I find Wittgenstein helpful. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ But silence, to me, doesn’t mean disengagement. It means recognizing that consciousness may resist the clean resolutions science is used to delivering. To turn away from that means not being rigorous. To turn away from that mystery just because it unsettles our frameworks seems to me to miss something vital about living—and thinking—at all.