Website version: https://lanasina.github.io/open_questions/
A list of research questions that either have no answers, or which consensus answers I do not find convincing.
Discuss here: https://github.com/LanaSina/open_questions/discussions
Why do the rules in simulations demonstrating 1st order emergence (eg individuas -> swarm) not also cause second order emergence (swarm -> swarms of swarms, or cell -> multicellular organism -> society)?
What is the equivalent of Turing Completeness for simulations of life? (How do you know a simulation has the potential to simulate, eg, a cell?) Is there a list of elements such that, if they can exsit in the simulation, it means that the simulation can simulate life?
Where does complexity hide in a CA? Rules, initial state, number of states? Can you shift complexity from one of these to the other?
What are systematic methods to increase the complexity of a system, for any definition of complexity?
Are life and any concept of “complexity” related?
Is complexity “good” for anything in living systems?
How much engineering in a simulation is overengineering? When does the complexity of the setup exceed the complexity of the outputs?
The less power you have on your environment the more you have to change yourself (adapt) to survive that environment. Corollary: an entity with complete power over the environment does not evolve. What does that mean for designing open ended simulations?
Domestication is a way to increase predictability over environmental conditions. Is the endpoint of domestication a fully predictable environment with at its core a domesticating species with arrested evolution syndrome?
Does the evolution from mingled action/computation systems (eg: RNA world, pre-jacquard looms) to systems with separated action and computation (eg: RNA-DNA separation, jacquard loom, the evolution of thought, hardware/software distinctions…) follow predictable rules?
If separating data storage from computation is generally good, and DNA is responsible for computation in a cell, what has the role of data storage? Or if DNA is the storage, what has the role of doing the computation? Are the two not separated? Will they evolve to be separated?
Is specialization = complexity?