The Shakespearean Cat

Thinking again about my earlier post on atoms vs cat, I found this passage in E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed:

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. The truth is that the peculiar combination of letters is nothing but a property of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The French or German versions of the play "own" different combinations of letters.

This analogy captures perfectly the approach I suggested in my earlier post.

[E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper, 1977), 19.]