Not recite a definition, but really explain it to me like I'm a third grader.

**Feel free to ask words you honestly don't know what they mean **

Beer

When you drink beer, is your experience and focus on individual bubbles, h2o molecules, the material composition of the can or glass, where the grain came from and what strain they used, etc ???

Not usually

Yes, you may take brief notice of some of those things, but your overall experience with that beer is, did you like the taste, was it the right temperature, did it make you feel good, what kind of shape were you in the next morning?

These were both great. Thank you.

The Green Dragon said:

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These were both great. Thank you.

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No prob!

"The whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

What do I win?

Yeah that's how I heard it first but didn't really understand it. But now I do.

Umwelt is another great German word for something similar without a good English equivalent. It's essentially the world as experienced by individual organisms which may share the same environment but perceive it in a different way. It's useful in my world for discussing how individuals from different cultures can share the same space and experience the same events but have drastically different perceptions of those events and their consequences.

Like how we see water differently than fish?

From a biological aspect, yes. Although it would more accurately apply to the entire sensory experience and perspective.

I mean that fish live in water so water isn't the same thing to them as it is to us. We look at them like they are moving through water but if they could communicate with us, they would think we are moving through air.

I think some historical context may additionally help. In the beginning of the field of psychology one approach dominated: structuralism. In studying mind and consciousness, the structuralists tried to discover all the base elements that made it up with the goal of discovering how they were integrated to form the totality of mind. But, there was a problem: they got stuck at the first step. Ever thought about how many different types of sensations there are?
They kept discovering more and more elements (numbering in the 10's of thousands).

In response to this apparent mistake, two new approaches emerged: the American functionalists and the German Gestaltists. The Americans focused on what mind does (as opposed to what it's parts were) and the Germans focused on studying the whole as it presented itself in human experience (a phenomenological approach). The Germans studied the "wholes" that mind formed often in the context of perception and pattern recognition.

The comparisons they aimed to make were between the parts and the wholes. Here we can discuss the infamous quote "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts." Based on some historical reports I read some time ago, this statement could be associated with two of the Gestaltists. One would have explicitly denied the validity of the statement and preferred something like "the whole is other than the sum of it's parts." The second would have insisted the statement is true and that it means the whole cannot be understood as an entity comprised of specific parts but is more than merely that. In philosophical terms, one could consider parts and wholes as two different ontological kinds with a relationship, however (and this is the key thrust of the Gestaltists), the whole CANNOT BE REDUCED to it's parts. Reductionism is useful in science, but it can go too far.