Q1:

Can psychological processes be reduced to chemical ones?  That the accomodation end of the psychological process ends in a state which cannot be described (completely, anyway) in chemical terms?

A1:

Like all other aspects of development, there is a trivial sense in the higher consists of nothing but the lower (e.g., intelligence consists of biological activity, life of chemical activity, everything of quantum mechanics, etc.). But this only trivially true. Any given act of organic assimilation could no doubt be exhaustively mapped onto a set of chemical reactions. But as far as I am aware, organic assimilation as such is not instantiated in any unique chemical reaction or even a unique group of reactions, any more than  ®predation ¯ or  ®nest building ¯ is. Nor does anything we know about chemical reactions tell us anything about assimilation, nest building, and so on. Yet these are perfectly real organic phenomena with material consequences. Likewise for the relationship between biology and psychology (or, a fortiori, sociology, economics, and so on) ¨C the coordination and synthesis of biological structures into intelligent structures introduces yet another, equally material level of material structure that is equally irreducible to its biology precursors/substrate.

One especially crucial illustration of each new level ¯s qualitative transcendence of its predecessors this is the uniqueness of intelligence in comparison with any strictly biological adaptation. As the Piagetian research on primates shows, human beings and other primates are all intelligent in _exactly_ the same sense as one another ¨C not just in _approximately_ the same ways (as, for example, different species have similar but not identical forms of vision). Of course, this could just be due to the evolutionary proximity of all primate species and our inability to discriminate fine inter-species differences. But the same could not be said of human and dolphin (and parrot ?) intelligence, which are not only separated by tens of millions of years of evolution but are also based on radically different brain architectures. Yet once again, the nature of their respective intelligences seems to be identical. I am sure if it was found that all forms of vision ¨C ant, fish, human - were as similar as all forms of intelligence, a lot of people would be shouting it from the rooftops. Yet when it is intelligence ¨C nothing but silence.

On the other hand, if cognition is reducible to chemistry, it has no properties that are not present in chemical reactions, so conversely at least some chemical reactions should be capable of cognition.

The whole really is more than the sum of the parts.