>> I am 'much more' than the results of actions when I act. I have a past history that has created me, a physical body being used to act with, the world I am ac

>> I am 'much more' than the results of actions when I act. I have a past history that has created me, a physical body being used to act with, the world I am acting in, and the resulting effects of my actions, plus everything else I have missed. I that what you mean by 'much more'? tl;dr -- Yes! The non-tl;dr: By "surplus of content" I meant to say that the rich, english-like syntax of something as high level as a Ruby DSL acquires rhetorical, intuitive meaning that cannot be reduced to a 1:1 symbolic relationship to the compiled instructions. But this "surplus" is supplied by the perceiving subject, in the same way that natural language itself is interpreted and redacted by the human being reading a particular work. I didn't mean to say that mathematical magic had happened as a result of complexity. I'm coming at this from a philosophical as well as a CS background (I studied both, but ended up in software). In philosophy, there is an ancient tension between rhetoric and logic. Logic is a brute force process -- a set of rules where the same input always produces the same output, just as (and, it turns out, according to the same rules) the same electrical series of pulses supplied to logic gates and pushed lockstep through them by the CPU clock will always produce the same output. Many analytic philosophical papers don't look all that different from a Karnaugh map describing the structure of a multiplexer, and the results of both are equally deterministic. This school of thought was galvanized by and built heavily upon the Principia we spoke of earlier. But there's another school of thought in philosophy that uses rhetoric and poetic devices as well as logic to achieve its ends. Language in this view (From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Heidegger's Building, Dwelling, Thinking) is decidedly not deterministic, but provocative, emotive and intuitive. Human beings communicating with each other with language use analogy and a commonly shared narrative history to provoke meaning to each other, rather than reduce statements to mere facts that are reduced to true or false. This school is commonly referred to as the "Continental" school, due to its prominence in France and Germany. Analytical approaches dominate British and American universities. So, my argument here is a function of a larger question about language itself. I'm saying that the English-like analogical techniques even at the lower levels are provocative and provide more meaning than can be reduced to the underlying logic. This is not to say that any software is less than deterministic -- of course it cannot be non-deterministic because the core functions are purely mechanistic and deterministic. So, an address changed in a DB is always changed in the same way, and a joystick moved in such a way to provide a stream of x,y coordinates to a controller will always move a character in the same way, etc. But the meaning on the other side of those events is supplied by a subject. At an extreme level, think of a high-resolution bitmap of Rembrandt's Philosopher in Meditation. The presentation of the pixels is deterministic, but the meaning is supplied by the subject. I'm saying that to a greater or lesser degree this redaction, the interpretive gesture that supplies a surplus of meaning is taking place at basically every level of computation. To a lesser degree at the low levels ("push", and so forth), but to higher degrees the closer to English-like (3G languages, etc.) we get. Images and literature presented in UTF-8 are just radical examples on one side of the spectrum, of how deterministic CPU instructions can result in this "surplus".