> reek of quantum spirituality... particles as being controlled by fairies who are locked up in hidden dimensions
With the cellular automaton interpretation everything could be calculated and is deterministic. More importantly, there are no silly paradoxes like cat's being both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed. The universe at its most fundamental level are bits of information, or automaton. The speed of light is the speed of causality. It's the clock-rate of our reality. No need for fairies, multiple worlds, or collapsing probability waves that lead to paradoxes.
> that self-organization is a very versatile term and that throwing it around with no context warrants more content.
No argument that you could "cheat" by going low enough to claim anything is a result of self-organization. But it's not cheating if the actual mechanism is. For example, saying that cells in a neural network are self-organizing is not cheating. Say that a neural network is self-organizing because of some fundamental laws of physics that’s many layers down is cheating.
> how that two vastly different systems at different scales can both exhibit self-organization described by similar mathematics.
That is the unreasonable beauty of mathematics
Finally, yes a hammer is not very useful if you have no way to control its behavior. While your magical hammer might provide a plethora of data for people who study it. You need to control what the hammer hits to use it do useful work.
There might be some use from this self-healing tech or any of the past claims. It's the hype that I object to. Then again, I also object to people calling Telsa's cars "self-driving".