Found a review of it on the "Wired" website, but when I logged on the website started loading cookies and collateral messages and links onto my system until it crashed...hmmm; there must be a message there somewhere....

I've noticed something interesting about the cosmos lately, the idea of emergent phenomena. If you start with Newton's Laws, you find that they unexpectedly generate orbital mechanics that were totally unexpected--like orbital resonances. They are nothing that can't be explained as simple celestial mechanics, but they were astonishing and unanticipated phenomena. Look up the Kirkwood Gaps.

Another example, when I first got interested in cellular automata
(like Conway's Game of Life) I learned that this simple operator unfolding in the simplest of mathematical spaces, using only a handful of rules, can replicate the entire Boolean Algebra. Nobody saw that coming! We can construct a virtual processor in a purely logical space that is then capable of all the activities and characteristics (and potential) of a silicon and metal computer.

In other words, a simple set of physical or logical laws will lead inevitably to higher-level structures of unimaginable complexity. Its almost as if complexity arises from complexity, it does it on itself with no help from us.

Nature is like that, too. The quantum universe makes the Periodic Table possible, which makes chemistry possible which makes organic chemistry and biochemistry possible, which leads inevitably to life itself--the cell and the tissues and organs and organ systems of multicellular life forms. Every one of these levels of granularity can be studied separately, without any knowledge of the foundations or extensions above and below. You can study genetics without knowing any nuclear chemistry, Mendel and Darwin never heard of nucleic acid.

Organisms, in turn, evolve, interact ecologically, and eventually lead to life forms, communities of creatures with individual psychologies and collective sociologies and anthropologies and histories. Each level of complexity completely contained in the ones which preceded it, and each with its own academic discipline dedicated to its study. And its not just a linear progresion of nested domains, they branch off in all dimensions and directions.

We used to argue a lot here on the Zone about the nature of truth (particularly, political truth) and just what was legitimate and what wasn't, what was the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity. This discussion foreshadowed much of what we later encountered: interpretation, perceived reality, propaganda, fake news, ideology. Things are either true or they are not--or are they? If it were that simple there would be no discussion, would there?

These nested universes I allude to are all real, but they may be totally irrelevant to another investigator or intelligence whose own consciousness is centered in some other personal universe. We've all met people who are experts in things like medieval French literature, galactic structure, golf, chess, Appalachian folk music, Neanderthal burial practices, Balinese dancing, fashion journalism, hedge investing, and a million other lunatic disciplines who really think these things matter, or should matter, and yet the rest of the world could care less. The skills essential to survival on the battlefield may be worthless in managing a career, or raising a family, or winning an election. And who's to say which one is the one that really matters

Actually they don't matter, and they do matter, both and neither. The universe is filled with complexity, and we get to pick and choose which ones we think REALLY matters.