Q:

What is the meaning of "concrete whole"?

When I am reading Philosophy and Simulation, I encountered the phrase:

"concrete wholes"

But I could not understand what does the phrase refer? Could you give me real world examples of concrete wholes and meaning of it?

And  even  if  one  does  not  have  a  problem                         with  an  ontological  commitment  to  entities  like  these  it  is  hard  to  see                        how   we   could   specify  mechanisms  of  emergence  for  life   or  mind   in                 general,   as   opposed   to   accounting   for   the  emergent  properties   and            capacities  of  concrete  wholes  like  a  metabolic  circuit  or  an  assembly  of               neurons.
  The   only   problem   with   focusing   on   concrete   wholes   is   that                           this   would   seem    to   make    philosophers   redundant   since   they   do    not                        play any role  in  the elucidation  of  the  series  of events  that  produce            emergent   effects.

A:

In OP's context, concrete effectively means actual, real-world, as opposed to hypothetical. One particularly common usage is the example in this dictionary.reverso.net definition...

concrete - relating to a particular instance or object; specific as opposed to general
a concrete example

The text specifically identifies metabolic circuit and assembly of neurons as typical "concrete wholes", meaning that these are actual real-world structures we can observe, that are "complete, irreducible".
In context, the writer seems to be saying such things are problematic for philosophers, because they seem to "spring into existence" in their entirety. Thus they're difficult to explain, since "half a metabolic circuit" wouldn't function at all (so evolution couldn't incrementally improve it, since it would have no reason to exist in the first place, but that's just a specious "Intelligent Design" argument).

