Is this not just picking a different abstraction? What is a “chemical” besides a collection of atoms? What is an “atom” except (some hand-wavey quantum stuff

Is this not just picking a different abstraction? What is a “chemical” besides a collection of atoms? What is an “atom” except (some hand-wavey quantum stuff that I certainly don’t understand)? Why give primacy to the chemicals over the atoms or the quantum field? We could go the other direction too, and consider it significant that we are a tiny part of a giant living body that is the planet. Does it stop there? Could we comprehend it if Earth itself was a part of some vast active living intelligent system, in the same way that we believe a bacterium or a cell cannot conceive that it is part of our own human body, seeing it simply as “the environment”? It all gets fairly philosophical pretty quickly. I certainly don’t have any answers, but I will say that I find it a little suspicious how when we move far enough in any direction from the scale we ourselves operate on, our understanding of how things work devolves rapidly towards relatively simple deterministic or probabilistic equations, while our own life experience is rich and rooted in desires and decision-making.