[the_d3f4ult]

This is an interesting perspective, but your view seems very narrow for some reason. If you’re arguing that there are many forms of computation or ‘intelligence’ that are emergent with collections of sentient or non-sentient beings then you have to include tribes of early humans, families, city-states and modern republics, ant and mold colonies, the stock market and the entire earths biosphere etc.

[TheOtherHobbes]

There's an incredible blind spot which makes humans think of intelligence and sentience as individual.

It isn't. It isn't even individual among humans.

We're colony organisms individually, and we're a colony organism collectively. We're physically embedded in a complex ecosystem, and we can't survive without it.

We're emotionally and intellectually embedded in analogous ecosystems to the point where depriving a human of external contact with the natural world and other humans is considered a form of torture, and typically causes a mental breakdown.

Colony organisms are the norm, not the exception. But we're trapped inside our own skulls and either experience the systems around us very indirectly, or not at all.

[Permik]

Personally, I actually count all of those examples into abstract lifeforms which you described :D

There's also things like "symbolic" lifeforms like viruses, yeah, they don't live per-se, but they do replicate and go through "choices", but in a more symbolic sense as they are just machines that read out/ execute code.

The way I distinct symbolic lifeforms and abstract lifeforms is that mainly symbolic lifeforms are "machines" that are kind of "inert" in a temporal sense.

Abstract lifeforms are just things that are in a way or other, "living" and can exist on any level of abstraction. Like cells are things that can be replaced, so can be CEO's, or etc.

Symbolic lifeforms can just be forever inert and hope that entropy knocks them to something to activate them, without getting into some hostile enough space that kills them.

Abstract lifeforms on the other hand just eventually run out of juice.