I think it is well established that scale can transcend limits. Look at insect colonies, animals, or any complex system and you will find it is made out of much simpler components.
Scale qua scale does not transcend the limits of the activity occurring in the system. Meaning, each ant in an ant colony has a set of fixed powers to do X, Y, and Z. Adding more ants doesn't change what an individual ant is capable of per se. Now, you might say that while an individual ant exercising its power X cannot lift a tree branch, a colony of a thousand, with each ant exercising its power X, might. But this doesn't transcend the limitation of the individual ant - each ant is still only exercising some power X - nor is the aggregate manifesting some new kind if power. It is only multiplying the exercise of X.
In the case of computers, a program is a set of formal rules that take some sequence of uninterpreted symbols and maps them to some other sequence of uninterpreted symbols. Adding more rules and more symbols scales the program - and it is the only scaling you can perform - but you don't somehow magically create interpreted symbols. How could it? This is magical thinking.
I think you misunderstand. I am not talking about physical ability. Ant colonies act as a complex system even though ants individually are incredibly simple.
I don't misunderstand. And if your comment has any relevance to the discussion, you're using it as an analogy to suggest that something like syntax can somehow produce semantics, which is impossible - actually worse, it's incoherent. It's an intellectual muddle. Obviously simple entities can compose into complex aggregates and produce net effects that no individual could on its own, but it doesn't follow that they can generate things that were not in power of these individuals to generate. That's my point. Otherwise, you are claiming that something can come from nothing.
> which is impossible - actually worse, it's incoherent.
If consciousness can emerge from neurons and life can emerge from chemical reactions then saying that "it doesn't follow that they can generate things that were not in power of these individuals to generate" is what is incoherent and intellectually muddled.
