[ben_w]

> The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement.

The laws of physics encode every motion and interaction of every particle.

None of those fundamental laws directly says "water is wet".

> I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

You see it every time you use a machine learning system. Even the simplest models, say a linear regression line in a spreadsheet, "learn" from the data, not from the code.