Philosophically and depending on what schools of thought you follow, reality is just a really complex GoL simulation. I'm sure I read about it once, but if we were living in a simulation, would we be able to know?

Universe could be probability based GoL simulation; basic Turing machine cannot handle that

I think of reality as of GOL but 3D, with more states other than 0 and 1, and conservative (follows conservation laws, no relation with any politics).

I enjoy the [GoL -> our “reality” -> outside-the-simulation] comparison. It really drives home how unlikely we would be to understand the outside-the-simulation world.

Of course, there are other variants (see qntm's https://qntm.org/responsibility) where the simulation _is_ a simulation of the world outside. And we have GoL in GoL :-)

Always a fun read :) they turned it into a futurama episode