Let's do something simpler.

Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs.

Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again.

Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add 1+1? Trivially I can think of a few conformations that can actually, if that's all you want to do. But you will need all of them together if you add 12345678+87654321.

So all of biology so far has been take things apart all the way and you end up with your hands full of a bunch of molecules. Are those molecules alive? No. You need to put them together into organelles and the organelles into cells before we call them alive.

How about consciousness? Well, we haven't solved that one yet, but we figure that -since it's a biological function - we should be able to pull it apart in the same way. That's biology's best guess anyway, and there's several sub-disciplines of biology working on it, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology to ethology.