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Comment by krrishd | Hacker News Reader

this is highly naive of me to ask, but "in theory" if we could simulate the universe, would familiar stuff like living organisms/'societies'/'humans' potentially just emerge within such simulations?

just super cool to think about even if not the case/unrealistic.

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Depends on how you define living, really. It's a philosophical problem, what makes one collection of matter "alive" and another "not alive"?

Since at least Thomas S. Ray's work on Tierra in the 90s we've been creating universes in which things that could be called "life" have developed.

The 'I Am A Strange Loop' covers this beautifully.

My understanding of Tierra and its successors like Avida are that the "digital organisms" are written beforehand and then systematically (pseudorandomly) mutated. Because the initial "organisms" are written, it would be a stretch to say that "life" developed in these systems. A statement like "the process of evolution by natural selection was simulated in an artificial system" would seem to be more accurate.

Yes, this is true, however I think the distinction is irrelevant. The initial VM was created with the intention of encouraging this evolution, had the original intent included spontaneous emergence of a-life as a goal I'm pretty confident that would have happened.

Seems like that's an assertion begging for an experiment. Take the software that manages experiments in Avida or Tierra, but don't supply pre-written organisms. Bit-flip randomly and see if something develops. Unfortunately I don't know the implementation details of those systems at all, so I can't say whether or not that would be feasible.

If we could simulate it past a certain fidelity threshold, it would seem so.

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