"There
are webs of complexity that tie everything together, and they are more
numerous than the stars in the night sky. At the moment of
self-organization of the bacterial membrane, complex feedback loops,
both interoceptive and exteroceptive, immediately formed. Information
from both locations began traveling in a huge, never-ending river
composed of trillions upon trillions of bytes of data to the
self-organized, more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts living system that had
come into being. The system began, in that instant of
self-organization, to modulate both its interior and exterior worlds in order to maintain its state.
It began to modulate its environment."