I think people usually want that sentence to mean something confused. I agree it has fine interpretations, but people by default use it as a semantic stopsign to stop looking for ways the individual parts mechanistically interface with each other to produce the higher utility thing than the individual parts naively summed would (see also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence )
I think people usually want that sentence to mean something confused. I agree it has fine interpretations, but people by default use it as a semantic stopsign to stop looking for ways the individual parts mechanistically interface with each other to produce the higher utility thing than the individual parts naively summed would (see also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence )