Game of Life must be the first simulation I ever took on as a programmer — and have revisited it over the years.
To this day it continues to come up in my mind when people muse about things like consciousness. Is there a magic dust to us? Or are we the result of simple rules playing out in a grand stage?
> As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull
There doesn't need to be a magic dust for consciousness, it could still be a primitive compatible with existing physics. See what Roger Penrose worked on.
I.e. an intelligent computing engine which learns to model both its environment and itself, with some degree of access and control of its internal processes including when it considers itself.
At the point of clear, continuous practical self-awareness, how could it not be “conscious”? It will experience it’s self’s awareness of it’s self-awareness.
Perhaps this underlying structure is the foundation of our metaphysics and our reality is just one node of it's permutative potentiality. The simple rules of GoL are just an emergent reflection of the fundemental nature of meta-reality. These types of relfections within our neural and semantic structures may be the necessary "magic dust" for consciousness to emerge.