[appstateguy]

What differs this scenario from individual neurons firing together in order to make the human mind? Can you keep taking that line of thinking down to the subatomic properties of the neurons themselves? I'm guessing this is the argument for panpsychism. The emergent property of human consciousness could be seen as the culmination of all the individual parts themselves have some form of primitive consciousness.

[EForEndeavour]

Isn't that argument roughly as useless as attributing the ability of a watch to show time down to each individual mechanical component? It's technically true, but not very useful to elucidate what actually makes the watch a watch. For example, it sounds kind of silly to say that a single watch gear has some form of primitive time-keeping ability, or has some form of primitive ability to tell me whether I'm running late. The universe is rife with examples of emergent complexity in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[Nasrudith]

Well it is still useful but not to you directly. The distinction being that the right intermediary could make use of it.

If you had a physics model it could describe it perfectly but it would likely involve a very large group of matricies and linear algebra constraints. You technically could work through every equation given a large set but examining the watch yourself would likely be quicker, if not learning to be a sufficiently good watchmaker.

However if you assemble a computer model to handle every component's interaction individuallt and a physics engine to do number crunching you could get a working mathematical model of the clock.