I don’t disagree with this in the slightest; the problem is that you can’t use it as a sort of ‘heap enough stuff together, and anything goes’-catch all. With emergence, there are basically two options:
- Weak emergence. The lower-level facts uniquely specify any emergent properties. Meaning, if you specify the precise combination of atoms and molecules (or quarks, or quantum fields, or strings—there is always a cut-off scale below which it doesn’t really matter), then everything on the larger scale follows, and in principle, could be predicted by a sufficiently accurate theory (and perhaps enough computing power).
- Strong emergence. The lower-level facts fail to uniquely specify the emergent properties. There are genuine further facts at play that need to be specified in addition to the precise combination of atoms and molecules (and whatnot) in order to get the larger scale phenomena right. Full knowledge of the base details and a perfectly accurate theory don’t suffice to predict the high-level features1.
All of the typical examples of emergence—bird flight pattern, water’s fluidity, and so on—are examples of weak emergence. You can, in principle, derive the dynamics of macroscopic quantities on water from the known properties of the H2O-molecule. The same goes for the computational powers of supercomputers over calculators and puffs of hydrogen and so on. In that sense, on weak emergence, emergent properties are ‘present’ within the constituent components.
Strong emergence, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast altogether. If the principle that the lower-level facts fix all the facts can no longer be appealed to, then for instance magic becomes possible: it might be that arranging a chicken foot, a newt’s eye, a drawing of a pentagram and a few candles in just the right way, then speaking the right words, actually does conjure up a devastating disease within your rival’s livestock. Or, the arrangement of the planets and the stars at the moment of your birth might well determine your future fate. Water might fundamentally change its properties after having been exposed to minute quantities of active substances. And so on.
There are genuine new facts about the world that don’t inhere in the components alone; we can’t use our experience and knowledge of the components to predict what will happen when we combine them anymore. It might logically be the case that the world works that way: one could certainly write a simulation where such things happen. But whenever we successfully construct a new device, predict a new phenomenon, build a new structure, we rely on the notion that the components allow us to infer the properties of the whole. Giving this up can only be a move of desperation, and any commitment that forces one to do so needs to be closely examined (and ideally jettisoned).
So no, there is no fallacy to the lookup table argument. While novel phenomena can occur in large assemblages, only phenomena permitted by the lower-level details can do so. We rely on our ability to predict those phenomena that won’t occur every day, whenever we build something new and are confident in predicting that it won’t spontaneously combust or grow wings and fly away. Saying otherwise is just giving away the game: there can be no explanation of consciousness or intelligence if it is to be a strongly emergent phenomenon; it will be as inexplicable as astrology actually working. Just a thing that happens without a reason anybody could point to. It is solving a mystery by mere stipulation: I can’t explain it, so it just happens magically. Sure, every problem can be ‘solved’ that way, but all that has really been achieved is intellectual surrender.
Apart from everything else, this is a huge metaphysical leap, and totally unsubstantiated. While one might reduce all of human behavior to a lookup table (but even this only if human behavior is deterministic, which contrary to your bald assertion current physics tells us is probably not the case), that human consciousness also comes along with this requires behaviorist commitments nobody would take seriously these days (and probably not even in the heyday of Skinner et al.).
1There is a subtlety here in that ‘the lower level fixes all higher-level details’ and ‘higher-level details can be predicted with the right theory from lower-level details’ may not coincide: theoretical predictability may be intrinsically limited. While I believe that such things indeed occur, for instance in phenomena related to undecidability, the distinction won’t matter much here.