I tried struggling through it once, but it's a long, dense read. (I should say that I find the complaints of Wolfram's ego overblown. I say if someone has don

I tried struggling through it once, but it's a long, dense read. (I should say that I find the complaints of Wolfram's ego overblown. I say if someone has done more than you, let them have their ego.) Anyway, Wolfram's emphasis on making the text accessible (through short sentences, etc) give it a meandering quality that makes it difficult to discern whatever implications he's actually trying to go for. There are so many examples that you forget what point he's trying to make. That said, I found some of the philosophy interesting. I didn't get all the way through the book, but the one that stuck out to me (which I also recognize is not something that Wolfram himself came up with) is the thing about how random outputs can come from systems with very simple inputs. The implications there are interesting because it means that you can't always reverse-engineer. ("Computational Irreducibility") It also means that reductionism isn't the end-all be-all of analysis, and that "systems thinking" and models-based analysis might be the only way to come to certain classes of insights. It also means that the existence of highly complex systems is not evidence of a higher power, or a soul. We cannot always reverse engineer the outputs of a highly complex systems down to a simple system with simple inputs, but that doesn't mean that simple system doesn't exist. So it starts tying into the free will vs determinism philosophical argument - the point being that we as people can be non-deterministic complex systems, and that might feel like free will to us. Which isn't the same thing as saying that we are highly complex deterministic systems, with response patterns that would be completely predictable if we could analyze it enough.