It's about self-replication, adaption and "scale-free properties". Consider that touch on the surface of my skin, which can be a few atoms of some object brush

It's about self-replication, adaption and "scale-free properties". Consider that touch on the surface of my skin, which can be a few atoms of some object brushing a single cell -- that somehow "recuses up" the organic structure of my body (cell, tissue, organ, ...) both adapting it and coming to be "symbolically objectified" in my reasoning as "a scratch". The relevant properties here are those that enable similar kinds of adaption (and physiological response) at all relevant scales from the cell to the organ to the whole-body. I think cells-oragans-bodys are implementations of "scale-free adaption algorithms" (if you want to put it in those terms), which enable implementation of "higher-order intelligence algorithms". If you want much much more than this, then even if I had the answer, it wouldnt be comment-sized, i'd be a textbook. But of course, no one has that textbook, or else we wouldnt be talking about this. I think if you see cells as extremely self-reorganizing systems, and bodies as "recursive scale-free" compositions of "self-reorganizing adaptive systems", then you get somewhere towards the kinds of properties i'm talking about. I think my ability to type because i can think, is a matter of that "organic recursion" from the sub-cellular to the whole-body.