If by "spontaneous", you mean a process taking several billion years which included heat from the sun, but also resources on Earth, with billions of previous ancestral forms from simple replicators to complex multicellular organisms, then okay.

That's not what I typically think of when I hear the word "spontaneous". Spontaneous emergence sounds to me like lightning hitting a swamp over a period of time, and then by a pure chance arrangement of molecules, a fully formed swamp man comes out of it.

That's way different than an evolutionary process.

But that's what the discussion is about here:

> Do you think creating a 3D universe (like that being worked on by open.ai), putting the evolvable agents in it and trying to make them evolve learning and intelligence is a good idea

Basically simulating a universe, seeded with some things we think are already somewhere along the road to intelligence, then seeing if progress is made just by simulating for a long time.