Well then, let’s reopen the question on that day. Dithering over something that may be defined “someday” is pointless.
Are you serious?
How would we ever learn something if we walked away from everything that hasn’t been completely figured out yet?
Gravity, Carbon, Oxygen, Helium & Beryllium, coupled with a precise Electromagnetic force and both a strong & weak Nuclear force is all that is needed.
Stephen Hawking & others are very clear these are all that is needed.
This is a public discussion board, not a theoretical biophysics conference populated by the brightest minds the world has to offer. No outcome will be affected by the existence of this thread. At all. Moreover, it’s in Great Debates and there’s nothing (germane to the topic title) to debate. Although you’re free to debate undefinable hypotheticals, I stand by my assertion that it’s nothing more than navelgazing. I’d have the same opinion about a thread discussing whether it’s possible that every grain of sand on the beach could be its own tiny little universe. And if so, then maybe the sun is a tiny little grain of sand in some much-larger beach! Sure, it’s a fun topic to mull over when you’re stoned, I guess. But what’s the point?
I’m not trying to threadshit here, just pointing out that the OP’s question is ill-defined in the first place.
But it’s not.
For self-awareness to evolve there are some minimal conditions that must exist:
1 - The ability to form non-linear computational units that can be linked together
2 - A non-random environment so self-awareness is rewarded
Taking point number 2 a step further, most likely there are environments that are not random, but that wouldn’t be conducive to evolving intelligence and self awareness. For some environments, intelligence may not be worth the energy and therefore a simple replicate fast strategy may always outperform an intelligence strategy.
There are interesting and real limits to the process of evolving intelligence and self awareness.
The first problem is that we can only speculate what the requirements for awareness are.
However, I bet most of us would agree that the minimimum would be a turing machine equivalent, and a means to evolve same.
But even then, it would be pure speculation as to what set of parameter values to the “universe generation” process would produce ones that would work. We don’t even really know what the set of parameters is. A physicist could come up with today’s best guess at that list, but we don’t know that some of those apparently arbitrary constants are actually arbitrary.
Even if we started with that list, it would be practically impossible to know what the outcomes would be. We couldn’t model it and calculate it because the number of possibilities (even for just one parameter set) is far too large to find all the ‘interesting’ phenomona.
Even given the constants of our universe, we couldn’t “calculate” the resulting chemistry from it. We’re lucky that we already know atomic structure, and can to a large extent show how that follows from the fundamental quantum physics. But if we started with the quantum physics and didn’t know the structure of atoms, would we get there? Or would we spend all our time modeling ephemeral processes that don’t end up making up the building blocks of our world?
Take it up one level. Say we know the structure of the atom. Stretch it a bit and assume we can even calculate all stable and naturally-occuring elements. Oops, to do the latter, we’d have to know about star formation and death, and how that creates the bigger elements. OK well just say somehow we guessed at that, and we can derive all we know of the fundamental laws of chemistry.
From knowing chemistry, could we have deduced that carbon atoms could serve as the basis for evolved life forms? Sure, carbon would be a focus, since it’s so chemically rich. But would we ever get anywhere near even the simplest protein, or DNA/RNA? Would we even discover the utility of amino acids?
The uphill battle isn’t winnable. You can’t deduce all of reality from first principles, simply because there are too many useless possibilities to explore before hitting the tiny fraction that end up dominating reality.
There is absolutely no way we could ever answer the OP’s question. No friggin’ way.
If you meant that as a joke, it’s brilliant.