"By that reasoning a work of art is just random colors and there is no reason to admire it."
I disagree. There is no conflict between admiring the organization of the fundamental particles and realizing that stuff is ultimately just big collections of fundamental particles.
Yes, but "realizing that stuff is ultimately just big collections of fundamental particles" is probably the ultimate in pointless activities. (Unless of course you are studying particle physics.)
By that measure every single thing that exists is exactly identical to everything else. If nothing is different, then nothing matters, and nothing has value.
Let's just short circuit that entire pointless line of thought and look at the whole, not just the parts.
I would add to my sibling comment here that one should note that a particular characteristic of the engineer (or software developer) is the ability to internalise all of the layers of a system and to be able to treat it as whichever subset of the layers are relevant at any given time.
Doing so hardly means that one considers all such systems equivalent or indeed that one doesn't think of a reductionist view as just the most reified (though pretty damned vague) possible view of the system.
That's a great point. All layers are correct, but most won't be useful for a given problem.
If you're thinking about, say, crowd reactions, then you don't want the "meatbag" model. Instead, you need a higher-level psychological model. However, if your problem is "what kind of injuries result from a bomb", then the "meatbag" model is right on.
Thinking of the body as a loose confederation of fundamental particles is fairly useless when trying to decide how much to charge for a product, but it's an excellent model when e.g. figuring out how much radiation a person will absorb from a source.
No layer denies the usefulness or reality of any of the others.
"By that measure every single thing that exists is exactly identical to everything else."
Where do you get this idea? "X is ultimately just a big collection of fundamental particles" and "Y is ultimately just a big collection of fundamental particles" does not imply "X is identical to Y".
It's like saying you should never call anybody a "person" because you're implying all people are identical. I mean, what?
I disagree. There is no conflict between admiring the organization of the fundamental particles and realizing that stuff is ultimately just big collections of fundamental particles.