Yeah it could be that Life has some property that makes it impossible to do observation or impossible to do manipulation. I was imagining that observation would happen by shooting out some fairly large structure that interacts with the environment and shoots back gliders in a way that depends on what the structure of the environment was. It would of course be impossible to measure the environment at the level of individual cells, just as it is impossible to read off individual values from the wavefunction in our universe, and also observing the environment would change the environment, just as it does in our universe.
Yeah it could be that Life has some property that makes it impossible to do observation or impossible to do manipulation. I was imagining that observation would happen by shooting out some fairly large structure that interacts with the environment and shoots back gliders in a way that depends on what the structure of the environment was. It would of course be impossible to measure the environment at the level of individual cells, just as it is impossible to read off individual values from the wavefunction in our universe, and also observing the environment would change the environment, just as it does in our universe.