Life, Gravity and Other Things
Hi,
For some reason, i got to revisit this code: https://github.com/hunar4321/particle-life – which is a pretty simple ‘life’ simulator. If you want to know how it works, feel free to watch the video, the idea at the bottom line is that everything is particles, with some basic properties, and they start doing stuff randomly, which in turn creates some cool things. The only things i have adjusted here were to randomize the start seed and enable gravity because we live in a world with gravity ourselves.
It’s mesmerizing to watch, but primarily knowing that if you’re really trying to think of it as similar to life, it pretty much is sort of similar. None of those movements are pre-programmed, right?
But anyway, as i looked at it, and kept looking, some other thoughts came to mind. i mean if you’d consider this that’s on the screen an entirely new world, and those particles as entities. We don’t really know what we’re looking at, we don’t know if they suffer or are happy. It all just looks pretty. We see the interactions and our eyes get attracted toward where the excitement and movement is, but we don’t know if we’re getting excited about good or bad things. It just looks pretty.
So as i was thinking about this, then at some level it would make sense if we were all alone in The Universe if someone else so very different than our world would be watching us like i am watching this world before me, could they see this world in the same way i see these particles? Not knowing what they are looking at, just following the excitement, having no idea about whether what they are seeing is intelligent – by our standards? Not having a clue about whether the things happening before their eyes are right, wrong, or anything at all or if these particles carry any meaning at all? Not really understanding any of the movements.
With that in mind, how could they know? Wouldn’t it make sense that if we’d be able to find someone else, they would have to be relatively closely related in terms of way of living, because otherwise, they’d just have no idea what they are looking at?
One can’t help but wonder: given enough time, and enough particles – or maybe way more particles – would they turn into something even more incredible?
i might have made the mistake of adding gravity to the system though because the gravity in this code pulls everything down, but as far as i can see it, the gravity should be an innate property of each object and probably add up in case objects combine? in which case i wonder if the end state wouldn’t always just be a big ball ?
Continuing on, i had another thought: What if those particles were always there, doing whatever they are doing? How would it change our perspective on them, if our act of writing the code would be similar to just having a window that’s just dirty and you can’t see anything through it, so this act of coding, would in essence be us wiping that window clean. Where would that take us in terms of reasoning? Is this a one-way window? Have we truly created something or simply washed the window clean so we can see what’s on the other side?
Pretty cool watch nonetheless.
Yours truly,
i
