Russell Standish writes: > It predicts that either a) there is no conscious life in a GoL > universe (thus contradicting computationalism) or b) the physics as > seen by conscious GoL observers will be quantum mechanical in nature. > > If one could establish that a given GoL structure is conscious, and > then if one could demonstrate that its world view is incompatible with > QM then we might have a contradiction.=20 > > Even then, there is still a loophole. I suspect that 3D environment > are far more likely to evolve the complex structures needed for > consciousness, so that conscious GoL observers are indeed a rare > thing. I don't know if this is the case or not, but if true it would > make a GoL example irrelevant. More interesting is to look at some 3D > CA rules that appear to support universal computation - Andy Wuensche > had a paper on this in last year's ALife in Boston. No arXiv ref I'm > afraid, but you could perhaps email him for an eprint...
That's very interesting. Is it a matter of evolution, or mere existence? I can see that life would be hard to evolve naturally in Life - it's too chaotic. But it might well be possible for us to create a specially-designed Life "robot" which was able to move around and interact with a sufficiently well-defined and restrictive environment. How much constraint would your theories put on the capabilities of such a robot? Is it just that it could never be truly conscious? Or would your arguments limit its capabilities more strongly? Consciousness is hard to test for; would there be purely functional limitations that you could predict? Hal Finney