Heroes Not Zombies

In “The Stream of Consciousness”, William James dismisses the ‘synthetic’ method of attempting to understand consciousness by considering small parts of it and trying to create the whole picture by assembling the various parts.

On every ground then the method of advancing from the simple to the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of human nature will prefer to follow the ‘analytic’ method, and to begin with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily acquaintance in his own inner life.

This strikes me as very sensible. The phenomenon of emergence was described much later, as were the findings of complexity science, but in fact, the more we have discovered about complex systems, such as living organisms, the more it becomes clear the that whole cannot be understood from a simple cobbling together of knowledge of the parts.