It all comes down to the fact that we don’t really understand what intelligence is. We know it is an emergent property of several mechanisms, working together, and we are even getting a decent grip on what those mechanisms are and how they work, but we are still struggling to see the big picture of how intelligence actually emerges.
We don't know if it is an emergent property. That's what we think it is likely. but we won't know until we find out what consciousness is. And we won't find that out until we crack the secrets of the brain.
There once was a time when we thought our bodies moved because there was an "emergent property" called the soul that instructed our bodies to move. It took a very long time for humans to discover how our bodies through the science of physiology.
