I'm not following. Meaning is completely arbitrary and doesn't have a right answer or truth value to compute.
Let's try to look at it a different way. Because it's on my mind for a reason unrelated to this thread, we can think of debates like what it means to be an atheist. Some might say it means that a person actively rejects god and will burn for all eternity. Others might say it means that the person doesn't bother with any superstitious nonsense or supernatural hocus pocus as they are critical thinkers. Most would say it means the person doesn't believe in god. And so on.
In other words, people will disagree over what the word means, as they will with many others.
What no one argues is that the word doesn't mean anything at all the way that e.g., the "word" lhihcvn doesn't mean anything.
I'm not saying that words are the only way that one can talk about meaning. Think of Pavlov's dogs. Pavlov never intended the experiment for which he was famous, he was simply feeding the dogs he had for another experiment. However, every time he did so he would ring a bell. He noticed that although the dogs first salivated only when they saw food, they learned to salivate even before seeing the food if they bell rang.
The dogs learned to associate whatever concept they held of "food" and "feeding" with the concept of the ringing bell.
The ring of the bell isn't a word, but it had meaning for the dogs. It meant they mealtime.
Once again, we can disagree exactly what concepts the dogs associated hearing the bell, but nobody denies that that this bell was meaningful to the dogs
and more importantly, before they associated the bell with food/meal concepts, it had no meaning for them.
That's what I meant. We can disagree over what words or symbols or whatever mean, and we can talk about how what something means to you is different from what it means to me, but to say that meaning itself is not the same for us is to say that there is no meaning. Basically, we can speak of the way things means differs, not meaning itself.
With water we are just talking atoms with which reductionism is compatible
Emergence is not necessarily incompatible with reduction. Some argue (I disagree) that it never is. But that's a whole different issue. The point is that we can't speak of the water properties of oxygen and the water properties of hydrogen, but we can speak of the water properties of H20. Likewise, we can't speak of how neurons understand but we can speak of how the brain does.
Properties don't just come out of thin air
They actually do, and there are several different technical terms (e.g., bifurcation) and names for the various ways they do, not to mention the types of systems that do so in particular ways such as self-organized criticality.
particularly when you have a smaller progressions over a large period of time.
That's actually a good description for one type of "out of thin air" effect, although it's a pretty mild effect. It happens with sandpiles. It literally is the small progression over time of additional components, number of external forces, stresses, etc., that at a time we cannot predict and due to a structure we can predict will suddenly alter completely. If it bifurcates (perhaps the simplest shift), then the system's trajectory in the phase space will suddenly and unpredictably shift. Sand in an hour class is different as it will suddenly completely collapse, but more interesting are sandpiles that form naturally like those on the shore. Both their formation and subsequent reformations are interesting. When they form, often we have completely explainable sand "particles" moving around in fairly uninteresting ways that suddenly get to a point at which they configure into a structure we can't predict. Then things will happen and the sandpile will, as you put it, be subject to progressive changes over time. None of these are remarkable or all that hard to at least approximate. However, the sandpile can then radically alter in such a way that the initial configuration is completely gone and yet even though it isn't there the final configuration is in part determined by the absent initial configuration. The moment at which it changes can be not only completely unpredictable, but the way it reconfigures is even more "out of thin air".
And these are very simple examples. Living systems are worse. For one thing, even changes that don't come "out of thin air" are no less (and often more) impossible to model. Even with very complex non-biological systems, everything is driven by external forces. But if we take the famous example of metabolism-repair that is a central process in every cell, we quickly realize that although this process drives most of the cell, pretty much all the sell is what drives it. So it isn't that something isn't that the metabolism-repair comes out of thin air- it comes out of itself.
When we look at evolutionary evidence we can trace the progression of our intelligence and see the emergence but much of which we share with closely related species due to common ancestry.
We can't see the emergence, although I think I get what you are saying. Generally speaking emergence is a name we give to properties of some system (whether a the internet, an ant colony, or a solar system) that "emerges" from the dynamics of that system. Evolutionary processes can themselves be emergent and certainly in our evolutionary past this occurred, but it just isn't the kind of word we normally attribute to the appearance of traits in the past because of the limits the past imposes on how much we are able to talk about the appearance of any specific traits.
That said, we certainly do share a lot. Again, I'm not singling out humans here as the only things capable of processing concepts. I'm singling out brains, which aren't unique to humans. Nor am I saying that something must be like the mammalian brain in order to have conscious awareness. I'm just saying that computers, quantum or classical, never will and we need more than computing if we want to AI.
