Maybe molecular biology is a place to start. I don't think we would call proteins life, or any of the moving things within a cell. Though I love those little kinesin guys. We have all those moving parts, non of the "alive" and yet as a whole cell we have lie.
So it also goes back to what you said about the chess program right, that given enough time and the right people who know what to look for they can unpack every single thing that the program did?
They exist only in our brains as abstractions. Of course thoughts and ideas have a physicality as chemistry in our brains. They also have a physicality as ink on paper and so forth.
For somethings, like life and consciousness, emergent properties remain inexplicable.
You might like this. I read a book a while back:The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All, Bernard Haisch. he talks about creation by subtraction.
