They’re not superficial at all. They are fundamental. u/unskilledexplorer compares and contrasts nominal emergence and strong emergence, and he is correct. Way back when, Aristotle coined a three-ring circus of a word, entelechy, or entelechea. Its meaning is often illustrated with an acorn. From whence does the acorn come? The oak tree. Where did the oak tree come from? The acorn. Hmmm. But it’s not circular so much as it is iterative because each successive generation introduces genetic variation, strengthening native intelligence thereby. Intelligence for what? For becoming an oak tree.

You can talk about “programming” as though computer programming and the phenotypic expression of genetic arrangements are somehow commensurate, but doing so is actually both category slippage of the highest order as well as an example of the limitation inhered by symbolic communication systems. Carbon-based life forms are far more complex and fundamentally mysterious than computers.

If you take apart a car, you have a bunch of parts on the ground. If you put them back together in the right order, you get a car. You can do the same thing to a computer. You can’t do it to organic beings. They will die. That’s the crux. The intelligence inherent to organic beings is simultaneously contained within, experienced by, and expressed from the entirety of the being, but not in that order. There is no order; it all happens at the same time. Ai can’t do that. Ai can describe intuition and interpretation, but it can’t do either. Conversely, we are constantly interpreting and intuiting, but can’t describe either experience very well. In fact, many of us are bad at expressing ourselves but have interior lives of deep richness. Human babies will die if no one touches them. Ai don’t need to be touched at all.