“ There isn't a platonic ideal "Apple" if that's what you mean by emergent phenomenon.”

Sure there is, that’s what DeepMind showed us with how to find cats in images :)

That's exactly my point. DeepMind has an idea of what a cat is based on its experiences, just as you or I do. Each of our models are woefully incomplete, based on very limited sensory information. These models all disagree with each other and reality to various degrees.

There exist many things many humans have lumped together under a single label such as "cat". Those categories are all wrong, but sometimes they're useful. Machines can also get in on the fun, just as well as humans, as you point out. There's no magic there, humans aren't special.

The humans aren’t special bit really comes down to whether you believe in free will (which by any meaningful definition is quite special).

Free will is another one of those things that people love to trot out because it's so ill-defined. To cut through all the crap though, it's very simple: "free will" === "unpredictable behavior". This inherently means that it's observer-dependent.

This has the benefit that it empirically fits how people think about it. Nobody thinks a rock has free will. Some people think animals have free will. Lots of people think humans have free will. This is everybody trying to smush a vague concept into the very simple, intuitive definition above.

Which is all to say that free will is about as relevant to any conversation as say astrology is: not one bit.

As much as a cloud of atoms doth protest that free will is irrelevant, reality has a way of not caring :)

Funny, I'd say reality has a way of existing despite all of the comforting woo people like to make up about it.