...there suddenly occurred to me a very preliminary explanation of why this might be.

Perhaps the phenomenology of the universe is merely the manifestation of a higher order set of mathematical functions or relations. Strange attractors may or may not play any role in what we call "physical reality", but they are a very measurable artifact of the mathematics that lie beneath.

It appears that all physical phenomena are capable of being modeled by purely mathematical formalisms, but the reverse, that some of those formalisms generate artifacts (like SAs, or fractal phenomena in general) which even though they may have no physical reality open to observation or experiment, they give us a means of studying reality itself.

I'd also like to stress once again that you do a little research on cellular automata, like "Conway's Game of Life" for some truly unexpected and mind-blowing examples of highly complex and life-like structures arising from a very few simple rules operating on a very simple and arbitrarily defined universe.

I don't thing the idea of the universe as a hologram makes no sense, but the posibility it is a result of "fractal automata" is very tempting.

Needless to say, I haven't worked out the details yet. 8)