Can't get paragraphs to paragraph so just running all this together. Also, nice beard.

All this talk of Life-pixels as rational agents might strike you as an outrageous overstatement... It's time for a sanity check: Just how much, in principle, can a designed constellation of life-pixels do? The answer is staggering. [Mathematician John Horton Conway] was able to prove that there are Life-worlds - they sketched one of them - within which there is a Universal Turing Machine, a two-dimensional computer that in principle could compute any computable function ... proving you could build a working computer out of simpler Life-forms.

This quote from Daniel Dennett's book, Freedom Evolves. The 'Life' he refers to is a computational game developed by Conway to test the interactions of differing, player-generated algorithms. Nerd alert. Reading it reminded me of Stephen Wolfram's TED Talk on computation: set apparently simple constraints on a repetitive formulae and, after enough iterations, some will produce unpredictable, unintuitive results. Why? How? Of all the confounding ideas, complexity from simplicity is the least intuitive and, perhaps, the least edifying. Maybe we just flatter ourselves when talking about magnificence of conscious life.