I think it was meant in the sense that the "criticality" could involve just a few neurons or many, but if for example we could learn how to detect it, that dete

I think it was meant in the sense that the "criticality" could involve just a few neurons or many, but if for example we could learn how to detect it, that detector would need to work regardless of the scale of the event. In CV there's a well known algorithm called Scale-Invariant Feature Transform, which does basically this.