[jkhdigital]

Ah, universal composition... the mother of complexity. Seems like the standard approach, in all manifestations of composed systems, is to find some property that makes composition “work” and then sandbox or guardrail the real system to (1) ensure the property holds in practice, and (2) recover without too much collateral damage when it fails to hold.

Of course there are no black boxes in the real world, but the staggering hierarchical complexity of life would seem to indicate that one can engineer systems (whether natural or man-made) that are close enough to be indistinguishable.