That it's hard to follow is beside the point (and it's hard because this particular character is rather complex, but I wanted to pick the character for "picture

That it's hard to follow is beside the point (and it's hard because this particular character is rather complex, but I wanted to pick the character for "picture" as a pun; some characters are much simpler, and could be very easily described, while others are far more complex). People are capable of doing that, and do it all the time (maybe not with characters, but certainly with other things). Sure, it requires prior knowledge, but that we can do it and do it often, suggests that perhaps most forms of high-level learning internally build this "tower of abstraction". One could claim that the internal layers of an NN do something similar, but that's not quite accurate, because the backpropagation process is global, rather than modular.