I have a few thoughts in response to Brad's question about a GoL pattern whose growth emulates that of a seed, with a quiescent phase and then an aggressive growth phase. First, if I were going to design such a pattern, I would try for something that would be stable until hit by a glider, at which point it would start to grow. The triggering glider could be launched from an arbitrary distance away, so the quiescent phase could be as long as you wanted. By folding the glider's path with reflectors, you could compress the "fuse" portion so that it occupied a more circumscribed space, but philosophically I'm not sure it's necessary or desired. Does a lotus seed have an internal timer that just goes off after a century? Or is it waiting on an external signal, like a water pulse? If the latter, the glider would be the analogue of the arrival of the rains. The rest of the "seed" could be almost or completely quiescent. We could do this with a glider gun pointed at an eater that consumes all the gun's output, until a glider arrives from a different direction and knocks out the eater. Now, as far as exponential growth after the seed is triggered, no can do. GoL has a ceiling of quadratic growth. Now, the real world has a similar polynomial ceiling, (probably cubic) but the typical time constants are so different that our universe can support temporary exponential growth, which goes until it hits some resource ceiling. After that there is often a polynomial growth phase (as we see with the geographic spread of an invasive species). I would imagine that GoL can also support temporary exponential growth, if the time constant were so low that the objects could get away from each other before reproducing. The objects would be very clunky and unsatisfying; nobody is claiming that GoL physics is anywhere near as agile, resilient, and pretty as real-world chemistry. On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 2:23 AM Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
Dennett is rightly skeptical of those pseudoscientific notions.
Trouble is, he takes skepticism so far that he doesn't believe in the existence of qualia (like the experience of the color red).
—Dan
Daniel Dennett said (in NYT article about Conway's Game of Life):
No psionic fields, no morphic resonances, no élan vital, no dualism. It’s all right there. And the fact that it can still support complex adaptively appropriate structures that do things is also important.
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