Anyone interested in the history of philosophy and science will know that the Frenchman René Descartes described his view of the research method in the 17th century. He believed that a complicated object such as an animal - Descartes counted them as machines - had to be broken down into its simple parts in order to arrive at the very smallest ones via organs and smaller units. This would make it possible to turn to the whole in order to understand it from its components. This process is known as reductionism, was at some point considered the only scientific method and was taught at universities.
Reductionism has recently celebrated its triumphs in molecular biology, in the shadow of which faculties began to close their botany and zoology departments in order to be able to explain everything in terms of molecular biology - life through its building blocks. Soon the sciences announced that they could get to the bottom of cancer and other disorders of bodily functions with molecular medicine. In doing so, they transformed health into a technical quantity that could be optimized by chemical means - i.e. medication. But if you ask around in the medical world today, you will notice that "molecular" has been replaced by other prefixes and that "systemic medicine" is increasingly being practiced. If you take a look at science in general, you will see that reductionism is now being replaced by its opposite, emergence. You can now read sentences such as "In science, nothing makes sense without emergence". Incidentally, neurophilosophers have long believed that consciousness can only be understood as an emergent property of the brain. In the meantime, everything seems to be based on emergence because, as we know, the molecule H2Ois not wet, but the water it is made of is. In general, it seems that the interactions of many individual parts can, thanks to the emergence of emergent properties, result in something completely different from what reductionism was able to find when dissecting the original whole. As much as we can be pleased about the new scientific perspective, the answer to the question of whether machine parts also tend to emerge could be exciting. You build a computer to beat the world chess champion. What if the machine wants to celebrate after its success and asks for a vacation? Would anyone dare to refuse it?
