the thing about your brain is that it is constantly changing, constantly reacting to things, and the question of how your brain may interfere with itself is something that i think we need new physics to totally grasp. i'm having trouble even finding the right language to try to describe what i'm thinking, and i think it's because it doesn't exist more so than that i am ignorant (although none of us are without ignorance).
our brains are creating and destroying new neurons all of the time, and even the dna is subject to modification. there's random error involved here, there's epigenetics, there's adaptations and there's that self-interference, enough that the premise that a brain might exist as an entity that cannot be fully reduced to it's parts is less crazy than people may have thought through the nineteenth and 20th centuries.
i don't think we have the physics yet to really get a handle on this. but, there's enough factors to wonder if how your brain interacts with everything around it is really reducible to it's components or not.
what i was getting at is that, as this is so complicated to us right now, and we can't functionally reduce the brain to a chain reaction of chemical events at this time, we still have to treat it as though it is greater than the sum of the parts, at least in some ways.
if you can work this out for me, i'll concede the point.
but, if you want to tell me that you can fully predict brain patterns in advance, i'm going to suggest that that isn't really consistent with our existing concepts of physics, which suggest otherwise. and, then it kind of opens the question - is the holistic concept of the mind merely randomness and error? or is there something else that getting through the more general difficulties of modern physics might get us to?
i concede that this is hard to talk about due to a deficit of language, but i hope i got my point across.