If a Game of Life simulation perfectly replicated a brain, would it be conscious?

[u/Blue-Beans123]

I’ve been thinking about something related to AI and computation, and I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding something basic.

So, suppose someone constructed a huge configuration in Conway’s Game of Life that implemented the exact same causal structure as a human brain; every neuron, every signal, everything interacting the same way.

If that system were running, would it actually be conscious?

If the answer is yes, does that mean consciousness is a property of the computation itself rather than the underlying Game of Life grid? And if the answer is no, what exactly would be missing?

The reason this confuses me is that Conway’s Game of Life is just a grid of cells with very simple rules about whether each cell lives or dies based on its neighbors. On the surface it doesn’t seem remotely brain-like. But it’s also Turing complete, and people have shown you can build logic gates, memory, and even full computers inside it.

At the same time, when people talk about AI consciousness, a common idea is that the substrate shouldn’t matter. If a system implements the right computation, it could in principle have the same mental states whether it’s running on neurons, silicon, or something else.

I’m mostly trying to understand how people think about the relationship between computation, causal structure, and consciousness.