The whole is less than the sum of its parts

"Almost every text written about the way that complex systems like organisms come to exhibit end-directed organization has echoed the refrain that there must be something more that is involved than merely the basic physics and chemistry. In contrast, and not simply to be enigmatic, I will try to explain instead how the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

My counterintuitive hypothesis is that whenever we recognize that a system exhibits ententional properties, it is not because of something added to the physical processes involved, but rather quite literally because it depends on the physical fact of something specifically missing from that object or process." (Deacon 2012, Incomplete Nature, p. 43)