I just read the abstract and some of the discussion. He is saying something interesting, however the language is pretty opaque if you aren't doing philosophy of science.

As I understand the abstract (ruthlessly oversimplified):

1. Emergent behvior is interesting.

2. We don't really understand how to theoretically model emergent systems. Emergent properties are high level, the stuff we can measure is low level. Connecting them in a principled fashion is hard.

3. We don't know if the limits are in the catgorization or aquisition of knowledge.

4. We are proposing a pragmatic bottom up approach which, like granger causality, bypasses some of the hard parts.

5. We test the approach on an artificially hard problem and got good results.

6. We think this has use elsewhere

It helps if you understand he's working in theoretical biology where they see emergent systems at all levels and the inability to model these systems jn a principled fashion is a real drag.