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A couple of sections ago we saw that all class 3 systems have the property that the detailed patterns they produce are highly sensitive to detailed changes in initial conditions.
It does not matter what initial conditions one starts from: one always reaches the same all-black attractor in the end.
Unlike waves on an ocean, all the bumps on the road are already present when the car starts driving, and as a result, one can consider these bumps to be part of the initial conditions for the system.
For essentially all of them involve only discrete elements which can be handled quite directly on a practical computer.
But how do all these various processes get organized to produce an actual animal?
Indeed, with this kind of argument, one could be led to think that there might be no single ultimate rule for the universe at all, but that instead there might somehow be an infinite sequence of levels of rules, with each level having a certain simplicity that becomes increasingly independent of the details of the levels below it.
Indeed, it seems that as soon as the spectrum covers any broad range of frequencies all but very large peaks tend to be completely masked, just as in everyday life a sound needs to be loud if it is to be heard over background noise.
For all one ever need do is to work out the remainder from dividing the position of a particular square by the size of the basic repeating block, and this then immediately tells one how to look up the color one wants.
And what this suggests is that a fundamental unity exists across a vast range of processes in nature and elsewhere: despite all their detailed differences every process can be viewed as corresponding to a computation that is ultimately equivalent in its sophistication.
It is a little like what happens in thermodynamics, where all sorts of complicated microscopic motions are identified as corresponding in some uniform way to a notion of heat.
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