Turing machines in the game of life have the same problem of being unprotected and extremely sensitive to perturbations. It drastically lowers the chance of generating a working one (even when running for extremely long times on extremely large boards). Contrast with our world, where it seems like just starting with a whole lot of randomly distributed hydrogen could be enough.

It's hard to imagine an emulated version of a human having a consciousness, however. What is it that separates transistors firing randomy from a CPU executing specific consciousness-generating instructions? I find these things thought-provoking.