RE: Emergent Properties
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Even though we don't know how life originated, there's nothing fundamentally mysterious about it. With consciousness, on the other hand, we don't even know what a scientific solution would look like, with many saying consciousness is impossible to fully explain scientifically.
A rock can be explained scientifically because there's nothing it's like to be a rock, so once you've described what a rock looks like physically, chemically, etc., you're done. But if you try to explain everything about a bat, you'll never explain scientifically what it's like being a bat, so that part of it, the subjective consciousness, will always remain inaccessible to science. Or so some say.
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Thanks so much for dropping by! As for the mysteriousness, or not, of life, science is still debating if, for example, a virus is alive or not. It seems that there could be a gradient from non-life to fully self-conscious life, where rocks are most probably at the bottom of that gradient, and we are at, or somewhere near the top, with viruses somewhere between rocks and single celled life-forms... Anyhow, there's still not one all-encompassing definition of life, there are several, most describing life not as a thing, but as a process.