I haven't read it yet, but you'd probably find Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" pretty interesting.

From the talks I've seen a lot of it seems to stem from the idea of simple rules allowing a lot of complexity. He talks about other cellular automata other than Conway's Game of Life, but the ideas are similar.

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/06/oh-my-gosh-its-covere...

This idea comes up a little bit differently in Max Tegmark's book "Our Mathematical Universe" which I liked too.