Definitely! It's hard to summarize that insight in any kind of concise way, though ... The Game of Life universe seems a bit too "fragile" to allow for the kind of emergent complexity that real-world physics supports. We can build self-constructing things like the https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell , but if anything gets slightly out of place, the usual result is a truly horrific catastrophic explosion.
Conway's Life design work is kind of like building robots out of masses of subcritical uranium. Everything's fine until two robots unexpectedly bump into each other... which means you have to start out with everything very carefully balanced, such that that never happens.
So I guess one fairly obvious insight is that real-world physics supports more reliable and less explosive low-level structures than Conway's Life does, and those low-level structures can then safely be used as the basis for new levels of organization -- atoms -> molecules -> DNA -> bacteria -> eukaryotic cells -> multicellular organisms -> colonies of organisms -> ecosystems.
It's not clear how those higher levels of organization would work in Conway's Life. If they're possible, then they seem to be far beyond our current ability to simulate them -- though there's some recent research vaguely along these lines, about self-replicators that might be able to exert some control over the space around them:
Conway's Life design work is kind of like building robots out of masses of subcritical uranium. Everything's fine until two robots unexpectedly bump into each other... which means you have to start out with everything very carefully balanced, such that that never happens.
So I guess one fairly obvious insight is that real-world physics supports more reliable and less explosive low-level structures than Conway's Life does, and those low-level structures can then safely be used as the basis for new levels of organization -- atoms -> molecules -> DNA -> bacteria -> eukaryotic cells -> multicellular organisms -> colonies of organisms -> ecosystems.
It's not clear how those higher levels of organization would work in Conway's Life. If they're possible, then they seem to be far beyond our current ability to simulate them -- though there's some recent research vaguely along these lines, about self-replicators that might be able to exert some control over the space around them:
https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5364