Is a car a "thing" or an "emergent property"? When you get down to it, the only "things" are elementary particles. A car is then an emergent property of a set of things (elementary particles) with specific relations between them (ie relative position, energy, etc).
No, no, no we are not going down this road again.
This is another "Gotcha" that gets dropped into esoteric discussions; that a "thing" isn't a "thing" if it can be separated into smaller discreet "things" and that science is somehow admitting something if it discusses "things" which are collective.
Yes "Joe Bentley" both the organic entity and the ongoing conscious process can be separated into smaller unique conceptual ideas, which in turn can broken down into smaller conceptual ideas for many, many layers.
But that doesn't mean "Joe Bentley" isn't a thing we can talk about. A collective thing is still a thing. But some reason Woo Slingers and Woo Apologist just latch onto this idea as if it proves or means something. At no point in the rule or spirit of scientific thinking does looking at a collective thing or collective process become invalid or unreasonable.
And yet again for the umpteenth time this is all semantics. Our language developed to discuss things on a practical, real world, day to day level. "Joe Bentley" is a concept because the ongoing process of consciousness inhabiting this organic entity is just a useful concept to apply a label to in everyday life. The mitochondria in my cells don't give a toss about "Joe Bentley" and neither does the ongoing heat death of the universe but my mortgage company does. It matters to me on the level I operate and I am 100% perfectly okay with that.
Me acknowledging that the concept of "me" is just a handy shorthand for the level of the universe I operate on most of the time isn't some admission of anything sinister or backhanded. It just is.
You don't have to embrace Woo to talk about things other then subatomic particles and energy transfer.