The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or is it?

[martix]

Everything started from a very far-fetched line from a game, that got me into researching some interesting stuff. And eventually I arrived at this age-old question. I mean can this even be true? And I'm not talking about some trivial stuff, but rather on a more fundamental and universal level.
So I just thought I'd ask the resident geeks here on their oppinion. :)

 

[christianjb]

10 trillion neurons laid out on a parking lot won't do much good, but if you connect them all together to form a brain you might be onto something.

I could go on.

 

[Evo]

Everything started from a very far-fetched line from a game, that got me into researching some interesting stuff. And eventually I arrived at this age-old question. I mean can this even be true? And I'm not talking about some trivial stuff, but rather on a more fundamental and universal level.
So I just thought I'd ask the resident geeks here on their oppinion. :)

How, exactly, are *you* interpreting this? Certainly the whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts. I don't get what you're asking.

 

[martix]

Erm... I don't really know. I read some stuff that I probably didn't understand at all, but nonetheless...
I'm not even sure how to explain it. :) Maybe something of the sort: Can you store more information in a system of things that could ever be stored in the sum of each of these individually. Or something...
Well I was playing the game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and they said something about an infinite-state machine - I thought it was something interesting and went searching.
I also just found this site: http://consc.net/notes/analog.html
It has this question:

Basic question: is the universe an infinite-state-machine or a finite-state-machine? If the second, then it is WEAKER than a Turing machine, so these analog solutions are essentially weak theoretically. If the first, then is it true that it is STRONGER than a Turing machine? At the very least, it seems that it has different theorems of computational complexity.

 

[rewebster]

Everytime I've ever dug a whole, I've never been able to put all the parts back in without sum left over.