There are two kinds of robustness in this universe, the static kind and the dynamic kind. You need both kinds to stand the test of time.
The blind spot of almost every proposed mechanism of neuroscience is the ignorance of one kind over another. 
The characteristic of emergence is that there always exists a fast process that is in continual feedback with a slower process. In an analog system, it is the slower process that is emergent. In a digital system, it is the faster process that is emergent.
However, all living things have both an analog and a digital system. All living things are dynamically and statically robust.
We are not surprised when an analog system generates emergent properties. We know that the interaction of molecules of water can lead to different states of matter (i.e. solid, liquid, gas).
We also are not surprised when a digital system generates 'emergent' properties. The user interfaces of today's computers and the virtual and augmented realities we create are all a consequence of digital encoding and execution.
Yet, we are in constant confusion as to brains work because we seem to favor one kind of robustness over another kind of robustness. We think of digital and analog as a dichotomy and we must choose one over the other.
This is of course has the decades-old mistake that we've been continually repeating. The duality is a fiction of our imagination. Both digital and analog frameworks are necessary for developing a general theory of intelligence.
Indeed this duality in coding is even more general than we possibly imagine. In the holographic principle of the universe, spacetime is encoded in an alternative space. What becomes local in one space is non-local in the other.
In @wolframphysics formulation of reality, there are two spaces, space and branchial space that describe reality (ignore the 3rd rulial space). What is local in one space, is a non-local frame in the other.
The blind spot of most science is that we think of causality only as something that is linear and sequential. We simply do not understand parallel causality. Yet everything we know about this universe happens in parallel.
The robustness in a linear sequential process can be easily understood in term of digital (or symbolic) framing. The robustness however of a non-linear parallel process is understood with our present-day tools using mathematics from dynamical physics.
The most promising formulations however are those that combine the two worlds into a coherent whole.
Let's explore this idea further here: gum.co/empathy
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