There's actually quite a bit to this post, including some stuff I agree with, and it's a bit unfair to pick on one thing, but I'm going to do it anyway. The thing I'm picking up on is the image of a dog and of some dog parts (a leg, a head, a tail, etc) with the caption "Emergence: is a whole dog made up of the sum of its parts?" What they're trying to show is that complex skills "can be decomposed into more specific "constituent skills and the interrelationships between them." Their point is to emphasize the interrelationships, and that's the part I agree with, with some reservations.
But the thing with emergence is that it does not arise out of "constituent parts". What they are talking about is composition, not emergence (like the way a wall is composed of bricks, but does not 'emerge' from the collectioin of bricks). So in the case of the dog parts, you can only make a dog out of them, not a cat. But if we're talking about pixels, the same pixels could be used to make an image of either a cat or a dog - the organization matters, but the compositionality doesn't. I think this confusion underlies a lot of the conceptual errors in Neelen and Kirschner's work.
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