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The idea that we should study 1-D CA and only 1-D CA is, I feel, overstating the importance of them. Wolfram doesn't know for a fact that these CAs are the be-all end-all of science, he probably just believes them to be so. And even if he were to KNOW for certain that 1-D CAs are the "source" of all existence in the universe, I still feel it to be extremely important to study everything that has developed as a whole FROM those CAs. Perhaps in exploring the relationship of our modern world today to Cellular Automatons, we could further ourselves greatly (perhaps actually discovering the CA that spawned everything), but studying CAs exclusively is not the only way to go.

Reducing all natural science to the phenomenon of 1-D Cellular Automaton is important, I feel, in the discussion of emergence, but note that what is necessary, should Wolfram be correct, is more of a "reverse engineering" of natural science than simply a study of CAs. We would need to figure out the steps that got us where we are today in order to determine the pattern, and thus the "rules," that govern this emergent, deterministic system we live in.