The CPU (or rather, the entire computer) isn't magically generating out of nothing something new. In a certain sense, there is no OS on a computer per se and ap

The CPU (or rather, the entire computer) isn't magically generating out of nothing something new. In a certain sense, there is no OS on a computer per se and apart from human interpretation. It is what Searle calls the "observer relative". This is in opposition to things which have objective reality apart from human observation. By analogy, look at text on a page. Per se, these are blobs of ink on a page. They are text only by convention: the person who arranged these blobs was using this convention when arranging these blobs, and you need to know the convention to interpret them as text. Too often, "emergence" is one of those "gap" explanations that tries to produce something from nothing. Yes, independent things can enter into interactions and relations that result in states of affairs that they alone could not have produced. That's obvious. You don't get a pile of oranges without a bunch of oranges. But a state of affairs of individual objects doesn't transcend being a state of affairs of individual objects as long as you maintain that they are still individual objects.