 What about the ontological side of emergence? The issue of the reality of emerging patterns in CA has been examined both by reductionist (Dennett 2003) and by emergentist philosophers (Thompson 2007). It is fair to say that the CA literature so far has not significantly contributed to the ongoing philosophical debate on the purely ontological side of reductionism. CA patterns that are “objectively” detected via computation, as per the Mitchell-Crutchfield approach, are not ipso facto new primitives to be included in an ontology. It may well be that features of a CA that are objective, in the sense of not depending on the interaction with an observer, are nevertheless ontologically reducible to more basic entities via suitable definitions (see Kim 1999; Dennett 1991). 