That is an issue prevalent in the western world for the last 200 years, beginning possibly with the Industrial Revolution, probably earlier. That problem is reductionism, consequently applied down to the last level: discover the smallest element of every field of science, develop an understanding of all the parts from the smallest part upwards and develop, from the understanding of the parts, an understanding of the whole.

Unfortunately, this approach does not yield understanding, it yields know-how.

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Kim_Bruning 6 days ago | parent [-]

Taking things apart to see how they tick is called reduction, but (re)assembling the parts is emergence.

When you reduce something to its components, you lose information on how the components work together. Emergence 'finds' that information back.

Compare differentiation and integration, which lose and gain terms respectively.

In some cases, I can imagine differentiating and integrating certain functions actually would even be a direct demonstration of reduction and emergence.

	▲	gond 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah that’s a nice addition. However, remember that reassembling is synthesis, not emergence. Emergence is what you /may/ get by reassembling, but must not. We are talking about systems, thus, in the end, you are correct. It’s just that the terms seem to be a bit muddled.