The Sum of The Parts

Let's say you had never seen a car before. What if I were to describe to you how to build one? Say I gave you a manual and all the parts, and provided complete instructions on how to assemble them. From only this much information would you be able to tell me what the car did? What its purpose was? Would you be able to figure out that it needed fuel to operate?

I can imagine that if I did the same thing with a more simple tool, say a hammer, you could figure out its purpose, or at least a purpose (or many purposes). But imagine the same scenario with a radio, or a cellphone, or a desktop computer. I ask the question because I'm thinking about how technology has changed the way we relate to the world around us. And what it means to be greater than the sum of the parts. This is the core of the problem associated with complexity. We may understand the components, and be able to describe them, and even the way they interact, but the sum of those interactions, the resulting effect, the 'whole', is far more difficult to grasp, bordering on mysterious. 

Why do I say mysterious? Think of an orchestra, all the components that make up an orchestra, from the players to their instruments. Now, does dissecting and describing the components of an orchestra, in as much detail as you want, tell us anything at all about the music the orchestra produces? Not at all. And yet without the music the orchestra is not an orchestra. And without the orchestra, the music is just notations on a page. The two are inextricably, definitionally linked. So maybe, the process of deconstruction actually misses the main point entirely. It might tell us how something works, the mechanics, without telling us anything truly essential about what it is. 

Another example, perhaps the most important and talked about one, is the brain. We can describe the brain in terms of its cellular components, its neural networks, its biological structure, its chemical composition etc. And none of that tells us anything essential about the brain, the nature of the mind, what a thought is, what consciousness is, how memories work, how emotions work etc.

People who study quantum mechanics are confronted by the seemingly unbridgeable gap between two distinct worlds, the one we experience every day and the subatomic one that forms the constituent parts of our world but appears to behave in ways that defy the familiar laws of nature. The two worlds exist at the point where we are trying to observe the unobservable (we're always trying to come up with new scientific ways to make observations), and theories fill the descriptive gap. It seems to ultimately come down to the limits of what is knowable and the nature of knowledge itself and its relationship to reality, which is called in philosophy epistemology. Another way of thinking about reality is the sum of the parts. 

Do the letters on the page and the sounds they make when we read them aloud tell us anything about the meaning of the words? What is the relationship between what we can describe and what something actually is? Is there any relationship at all, or is it merely an approximation? A best guess? A probability? Can we even talk about understanding the nature of reality? The sum of the parts.