On a philosophical level, [the phenomenon of chaos] struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

At the same time, I’d always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the creation of organization, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that? I always felt that the spontaneous emergence of self-organization ought to be part of physics.

Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.

Doyle Farmer, in Chaos by James Gleick