The sum of the parts is greater than the whole

"The sum of the value of parts is less than the value of a whole"

This is what systems scientists (or should I call them philosophers) would wants you to think. To give an analogy, what they're trying to say is that if we were to study a cat, should we take it apart, the first thing we're going to get is a dead cat. Surely this must means that a cat is more than all the parts of a cat added together? Well, before coming to any conclusions yet, lets take a better look at the cat.

A cat is basically an organism made up of billions upon billions of cells. Each cell being quite alive, each cell growing and reproducing, interacting and manufacturing, all these when zoomed out, creating what you see in cat. What systems scientist/philosophers will have you believe is that the cat is all these cells, and more. Together the cells does something that each individual cell can't do alone, they can make the cat see and breathe, allow it to eat or sleep, surely by looking at individual cells we can't work out these characteristics when we put them all together, then doesn't that means the cat is more than cells put together?

Well, what these people doesn't seem to realise is that in every single cell of the cat (except red blood cells), stores the entire set of a genetic library of what it means to be that particular cat in question. This library is found within the nucleus of the cell, in the sequence of DNA itself. The most amazing thing is that this library is ready to become an entirely new cat at any time. If we were to take the nucleus of any cell of the cat out, and implant it into an embryonic cell in the womb of a cat (could be the same one, if female), what we would get is an identical copy of the cat, and if we were to closely observe the stages of development of the cat, we can see specifically how the DNA cause the different features of the cat to appear. So if we were to look at a cat again, one cat is actually equivalent to a million, million potential copies of that same cat. Is the sum of the parts still less than the whole?

Of course some unbelievably stubborn philosophers will try to tell you that the cloned cat would never be the same as the real cat itself. At the very least its personality would be different, even if it isn't so, it would be impossible to have 2 cats with exactly the same arrangement of cells at the microscopic level. I would reply that if we were to specify the word 'parts', then it must also include the past of the cat. Where and when the cat have been in its life and the events that have taken placed during that time must be accounted for as parts of the cat. As for the second problem, I suspect that this is probably also the result that 'parts' has not been specified. DNA gives cells rules to follow, and not the exact location of where to place the next cell. As a result, if we really want to compare, we must also take into account that 'parts of the cat' includes all the different environmental factors that affects the development of the cat, from radiation in the surroundings, to the protein composition present in the mother's milk. (To keep all of them in control is almost impossible)

If we have to take everything that affects a cat into account, then surely the sum of the value of the parts of the cat is greater than the value of the whole, after all, it is quite conceivable for a different order of the influences to cause the cat to develop in an entirely different way. With the order of events fixed, then the possibility of other ways of development now becomes more limited. Therefore, the sum of the parts allows a wide range of possibilities, but the whole would drastically restrict that. Hence shouldn't it mean that the parts are of greater worth than the whole?