Quote: "ever played that goat simulator game? it's not a simulator, I bet the people who made goat simulator never played a train simulator game"
Goat simulator was a parody on the many other ridiculous simulators popping up around that time. That's why it isn't a "real" simulator. It was a joke.
Quote: "if you could program from the ground up all the real world physics like fluid dynamics viscosity, chemical elements and the way they bond al the way up to dna. You could theoretically build and program a human cell. That one cell would be an embryo cell and if the programming were correct it would behave and multiple. In time, a digital representation of a human would emerge and their brain. essentially being a non programmed intelligence. "
You should read
The World Within the World by John D. Barrow. It is a highly thought provoking book on all of the big questions such as "can we simulate consciousness?".
To give you the short answer: No, it is not possible to simulate a cell on a classical computer.
You may now be wondering: But we
have simulated cells on computers. We
have simulated the universe. Obviously what I just said is false! Yes and no. As DJD79 mentioned, those simulations are merely very rough approximations.
One of the great dogmas in today's science is the belief that everything is mechanical.
Quote: "1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers."
http://wariscrime.com/new/the-ten-dogmas-of-modern-science/
The truth is we don't know this, and we cannot prove this. We seem to believe that something as complex as human consciousness can be computed, while in reality we fail at simulating a single atom. Yes, something as simple as a hydrogen atom exhibits behaviour too complicated to calculate. Why? One word: Determinism.
An atom is not deterministic. If hypothetically we knew the "initial state" of an atom (position and location of the electron) - which is of course not possible, but we will assume this for the sake of argument - it would still be impossible to predict how that atom would behave over time. The best we can do is make probabilistic assumptions, e.g. "There is a 30% chance the electron will travel at speed X in direction Y". This is because the electron (and everything else at that microscopic level) is inherently chaotic in nature.
So I ask you this: If we can't even simulate an atom, how then can we make the assumption that something as complicated as a cell can be simulated? The answer is we can't. We can make
approximate simulations of cells, but those simulations will never behave like the real deal.
Did you know that even in math there are problems that can no longer be solved perfectly? One very simple example: Finding the roots of a polynomial. We know it is possible to solve for 2nd order polynomials (ax^2 + bx + c), we even have a formula for 3rd order polynomials, but as soon as you have higher order polynomials, you can no longer find the roots with a formula. You can only
approximate those roots.
One very interesting feature of consciousness is that it changes its behaviour when it
knows it's being observed. For example, if you were to monitor my behaviour over some months, you would see patterns. I go shopping every Thursday at 18:00. You could therefore make a prediction that I would go shopping next Thursday at 18:00. But what happens if I found out that
you knew I would go shopping at 18:00? There is a high chance that I would intentionally go at a different time, to prove you wrong. But hey, what if you knew that I knew? You could predict that I would intentionally go shopping at a different time on purpose, but if I knew that you knew that you knew, then maybe I'd decide to go shopping at 18:00 anyway.
This "recursion" is a big problem when it comes to computing something like consciousness. You'd have to consider all of the infinite possibilities in order to make an accurate prediction. Another reason why it cannot be computed on classical computers.
Why is this relevant? Cells exhibit this same behaviour. If a cell is observed, it alters it's behaviour based on that observation.
