I feel like I'm in a parallel universe where Stephen Wolfram doesn't exist. But he does, he's a living legend, and his seminal work, A New Kind of Science, and its core concepts, computational equivalence and computational irreducibility, are the answers you're looking for here.
For more up-to-date thoughts on thermodynamics I'd start here: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo...