The fact that he is not willing to kill his grandmother to save the chickens doesn’t imply that chickens have 0 value or that his grandmother has infinite value.
Consider the problem from an egocentric point of view: to be responsible for one’s grandmother’s death feels awful, but also dedicating your life to a very unlikely possibility to save someone who has been declared dead, seems awful.
Then I agree with you, certain phenomena present characteristics that emerge only from the interactions of their parts.
I tried to express a similar concept when I wrote: “All this things are valuable but only together they make something qualitatively more important, which is often called human flourishing or Eudaimonia.
Similarly only if pain is combined with frustration, fear, desperation, panic, etc. it becomes something qualitatively worst such as agony.”
I would like to ask you a question (because I became curious about people’s opinion on the subject after I read these posts): do you think that humans are, or at least should be utility maximizer when pursuing their goals? (I think that we should be utility maximizer when pursuing the resources to reach our goals, but I wonder if people decision process is too incoherent to be expressed as a function)