I have a really hard time understanding the mind-set of the "reductionist." I don't think one can understand anything by fixating on a "part" in isolation. To say that Shakespeare is reducible to words, grammar, etc. -- as both js1138 and (seemingly) RWP suggest -- is to admit that one doesn't understand Shakespeare. Certainly, he was a genius in the use of words; but RWP's and js' model doesn't let you see that the truly magnificent achievement of Shakespeare was, not his writing down of words to paper, but his articulation of profound insights into the human condition. Words were just his "instruments" toward that end.
Similarly, it seems to me that matter (i.e., words in our analogy) + the physico-chemical laws (grammar or syntax) are instrumental in precisely this sense. However, there seems to be little curiosity about what matter + laws are "instrumentalizing."
To put it crudely, you can study a tree all day long and not get the least inkling of the forest, or of the larger ecosystem of which the forest is a part, extending to Terra, the solar system, and beyond. Presumably these are "parts and participants" of a dynamic, integrated, universal whole. But apparently, reductionists aren't interested in this aspect of the problem.
But still they say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet to my mind, reducing the parts of the larger whole to matter + physicochemical laws effectively means that the whole is a simple sum of its constituting parts.
But the parts can't tell you about the whole in which they occur, because the parts can tell you nothing about the dynamic relations that obtain among them -- for they are considered in isolation from, or abstracted from, the larger context in which they occur.
To use the Shakespeare analogy once more, it's as if Shakespeare just set down a whole bunch of words in no particular order, and at the end of the exercise we get a Hamlet, a King Lear, a Macbeth.
I suspect the great attraction of reductionism is it fits very well with intentionalist consciousness: That is, the model of the subject intending objects of cognition. But as Eric Voegelin points out (in Order and History, Vol. V: In Search of Order), there is more to the human mind than a subject intending objects. A far more profound dimension is what Voegelin (following Plato and Aristotle)calls luminosity: self-reflective consciousness, which is the subject reflecting on his own experiences by drawing on memory, juxtaposing different concepts, problem solving and abstract analysis, etc. -- none of which are "objects" in phenomenal reality. Indeed, they are instances of nonphenomenal reality, or as Voegelin sometimes puts it "nonexistent reality."
Anyhoot, luminosity is that dimension of mind (if I might use the term "dimension" in this context, which is probably misleading) where creative action, abstract thought, meditation, and contemplation occur.
Oddly enough, all such "nonphenomena" are not reducible to lesser "parts"....
In sum, you don't understand living systems by breaking them down to their parts. It's not the parts that are crucial, but how they are dynamically related one to the other and each of them, up to the "level" of the macroscopic totality of the living system. FWIW. Thus it seems in addition to the physico-chemical laws, something else is needed for life to occur: systematic, organizational information.
Must run for now. Thank you so very much for writing, DK! Great insights!
That a large number of water molecules together strictly follow the quantum mechanical equations of motion is not in any doubt. And yet there are qualities to water that are not easily derived from those equations of motion. Something can be deterministic, made up of cimple constituents, and yet possess regularities that do not in a trivial way depend on the properties of its constituents.
You problem is you're stuck in a false antithesis. The universe is not divided two-fold into things that can be described by the interactions of simple, elementary components, and things that are complex and 'interesting'. Complex and interesting phenomena can arise from systems that can be strictly and rigorously desribed by the motions of simple components. That's just a fact.
It appears the reductionists' argument is that higher tiers (such as meaning and universals) are merely epiphenomenons of "matter in all its motions".
Concerning the brain as the governor of the body, here are a few points for your correspondents and Lurkers:
2. As the McConnell experiments have shown - there is more at work than the brain: take a flatworm, teach him to react to stimulus and then chop him into two parts. Both parts will regenerate into a flatworm, but only one of them had the half with the original brain. But use the same stimulus on both flatworms, and they will react with the same memory.
3. Put a hundred army ants on a flat surface and they will walk in a circle until they die of exhaustion. But gather up a million of them and they will form a colony, conduct raids, keep a geometry, a calendar and a stable temperature in the nest.