For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
The incessant idea that I get when I read about quantum physics: with no observers and nothing to interact with/measure it, was the universe itself in superposition during the Big Bang? If so, did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?
If you are asking the question, wouldn’t you be observing it, therefore the wave function most certainly did collapse?
I’m hearing the echo of Descartes in there. I think, therefore I am.
EDIT: “I ask, therefore I have observed, therefore the Universe is”.
That’s the wrong interpretation of “observing”. Observation is the act of measuring the properties of an object/particle by “interacting” with it. Basically if something is not being observed (I.e completely isolated) it enters superposition until such a time that it’s measured/interacted with again. Observation has nothing to do with consciousness imo, just connection to causality in the universe at large.