 (CA3)  and  (CA4)  enter very directly into the philosophical arena: as for  (CA3),  Daniel Dennett has resorted to a famous automaton we describe below, Conway’s Game of Life, to make his point on determinism and the attribution of high-level concepts to emergent patterns (Dennett 1991, 2003). As for  (CA4),  CA can provide an account of microphysical dynamics by representing discrete counterparts of quantum field theories (see entry on  Quantum Field Theory)  alternative to the standard continuous frames. But the more philosophical, and quite bolder, claim in this area is that nature itself may be a CA: Edward Fredkin, for instance, has advanced his “Finite Nature” hypothesis that our universe is an automaton which, at each time step, digitally and locally processes its state for the next time step (see Fredkin 1993). Apart from the interest generated by Fredkin’s claim, entertaining the hypothesis raises a number of questions at the crossroads of physics and metaphysics (what is a natural law?), epistemology (what are the limits of physical systems predictability?) and the philosophy of information (what is the role of information in the physical world?). We will address each of these questions in the third Section of this entry.