This is truly fascinating. I had not heard of GoL until today, so it will take my pea brain a bit to grasp this. Thank you for taking the time to share it.
Another useful feature of the emergent patterns in GoL is that they can help shed light on the debate about whether there is top-down causal influence, or whether it's causally bottom-up.
The patterns in GoL are clearly the result of bottom-up processes, but their behaviour and interactions can only usefully be described at the level of the patterns, as interacting processes or entities in their own right. So if you were asked whether, given a particular grid configuration, a particular cell would switch on or off when the game is in progress, you could only usefully predict the answer by looking at the patterns that would form and whether any pattern was likely to move into that area and interact with the patterns there; i.e. a top-down approach. Pattern X interacts with pattern Y causing a 'glider' to move across the grid and change the state of the target cell. There's no convenient or useful way to express that in terms of individual cells switching on and off.
So, when dealing with emergent processes or systems, a causally top-down view is often the only useful and coherent way to describe them. Both bottom-up and top-down descriptions are valid in their own domains, but each domain has its own descriptive language and concepts. This is true in everyday life - we don't talk about the kinetic energy of individual gas molecules, we talk about the temperature and pressure of the gas, and we can use the
Gas Laws to calculate how they will change in different circumstances without considering the molecules at all.
This 'coarse-graining' or 'chunking' of the world throws away vast amounts of hard-to-process information in exchange for a compressed summary, an approximation that is easy to understand and manipulate. I think this applies as much to the way we conceptualise and describe human consciousness, thought, and behaviour as we do the world around us.
