Laughing Mask: Oh really? And how sure are you about that?

Crying Mask: Do you really not know how well we can predict at the microscopic level of physics? It’s perfect.

Laughing Mask: But the same laws don’t work at other scales. They lead to contradictions and absurdities. Particles with infinite force, that sort of thing. You people pick and choose your laws without thought as to how they all fit together.

Crying Mask: Even if that were true, there will be a theory of everything soon enough.

Laughing Mask: Since the invention of physics it always seems to do everything it’s asked until it doesn’t.

Crying Mask: I swear, your attitudes are positively medieval. You can’t escape the laws, they apply everywhere. Even in your precious wetware brain.

Laughing Mask: When was the last time you opened up the brain and looked? Here’s how you actually see if a system follows the laws of physics that we have. You create a model of that system on a supercomputer, a model system. And you build the model system out of your very best descriptions of fundamental physics, whatever you think the lowest level is, say, the wave function. Now, you put both the model system and the real system into exactly the same initial state. If their following state-space trajectories are totally identical, then yes, the real system was totally reducible to the microphysical laws. But if their trajectories differ then you know that you can’t model the real system using just the most microscopic laws of physics.

Crying Mask: That’s not a feasible test for any complex system! If you didn’t get the initial states just right, chaos theory would kick in, and then the state-spaces would diverge. How could you tell if the reason your results are different is really that the laws are different or just that there was some noise that’s been amplified?

Laughing Mask: Exactly! See, chaos hides emergence! How would anyone notice? It’s all heuristics and coarse-grains with complex systems. Just like how new laws of physics were needed once you started looking at the very small and the very large, new laws might be needed once you start looking at the very complex. You just can’t be sure that the physics of two atoms interacting in a void obtains in complex systems. Or conscious systems, for that matter. You have the laws for the microscopic and macroscopic, but where’s the mesoscopic?

Crying Mask: An impossible standard. You’d need a supercomputer the size of the galaxy to check that there’s no deviations from physics inside the human brain.