I was just expressing an intuition that as we go past "Level X" (put a large number in there), keeping the OP's metaphor, we may graduate out of this need for a clearly defined shared state for most of the problems we are trying to solve... we may think in terms of a "perceivable state" that gives as a probability for the system to be in a certain "'real' state"...
(think of the human consciousness or self, we imagine that it really exists, that there actually is an "I" or "self", we consider "my mind in this second" as a "state"... but it can just as well be seen as an emergent property, a perceived state that has a certain probability to exist in a certain way based on the states of zillions of components more or less well connected)
...anyway, it's going very off topic so better leave it and let's get back to ..."work" :|
...oh, wait, did I just describe the hive-mind-ish (but gorgeous:P) monster that the web is evolving into? :)
(edit to add long winded off topic reasoning: why should we even try to understand as a whole the complex systems we create? can't we just build them out of understandable components and accept the fact that any large distributed system will tend to evolve into something beyond the comprehension of any human mind and accept that "100% understanding" !== "control" and that we don't even need that much control, we just need to make things work 95% of the time. just divide the problem, divide the people and let the "hive mind" evolve... functional languages and the conceptual tools they offer us, useful as they surely are, just foster the illusion that complete understanding and control of the systems we create will continue to be possible - I'd argue that some of what we now cal "distributed systems" are already tipping past the edge of "undestandabilty" and we should slowly learn ways of controlling their evolution and components and not the systems as a whole...)