Alan Kay's Turing Award Lecture ends with a demo that shows the drive-a-car thing 
– a fascinating exploration of object oriented programming, a fulfillment of his expression that "everything is an object."
Meta abstraction
He talks about classes as being horizontal, not hierarchical, all independent of each other – an aspiration perhaps not fully achieved in Smalltalk. There, classes were nested like Russian dolls.
One of his most intriguing comments was that "meta is safe if you allow fence after fence after fence after fence." that he made here .
His idea of a fence is closely aligned with Alexander's concept of boundaries that is found in his 15 properties, That Which Emerges.
>**Property 3: Boundaries** In nature, we see many systems with powerful, thick boundaries. The thick boundaries evolve as a result of the need for functional separations and transitions between different systems. They occur essentially because wherever two very different phenomena interact, there is also a ‘zone of interaction’ which is a thing in itself, as important as the things which it separates.
15 Properties
Boundaries are one of the three properties of "wholeness" for each element in his Natural Order – his description of the essential characteristics defining vital, autopoietic systems:
* Strong Center (intention) * Boundaries (responsibility) * The Void (whitespace - ma)
These concepts align with Friston's concept of Markov Blankets, explored in a paper _On Markov blankets and hierarchical self-organisation _ which states:
>Biological self-organisation can be regarded as a process of spontaneous pattern formation; namely, the emergence of structures that distinguish themselves from their environment. This process can occur at nested spatial scales: from the microscopic (e.g., the emergence of cells) to the macroscopic (e.g. the emergence of organisms). In this paper, we pursue the idea that Markov blankets – that separate the internal states of a structure from external states – can self-assemble at successively higher levels of organisation.
The authors of this paper go on to state: >These simulations are offered as a proof of concept that hierarchical self-organisation of Markov blankets (into Markov blankets) can explain the self-evidencing, autopoietic behaviour of biological systems.
By aligning core concepts from Kay, Alexander, and Friston, we sense insight into what Kay was talking about what he was calling for a 'higher level of thinking', something we have have been struggling to name, calling it Quantum Thinking, as we seek to explain this essential concept to others, that which allows the unfolding of self-referential Strange Loops.
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