Well I think of it as the state machines and cellular automata. And yes, how cellular state machines work is clearly different than how a computer state machine

Well I think of it as the state machines and cellular automata. And yes, how cellular state machines work is clearly different than how a computer state machines work, they have a surprising (to me) lot in common. If you are interested in these comparisons I can recommend two books, one is Feynman's "Lectures on Computation" which discuss computation (and programming) in a very generalized way, and Nick Lane's "The Vital Question" which looks at the origins of life and discusses the evolution of multicellular organisms in a very approachable way.