It can't be a stronger property, the essence of Turing-completeness is that a Turing-complete automaton can simulate any other Turing-complete automaton, including itself.

Whether an automaton, capable of scale-invariant self-simulation, but not exhibiting Turing-completeness, is even possible, is a very interesting question. I don't know the answer.

People have built explicit turing machines in GoL, so it certainly is Turing-complete.

> Is the ability to do this tied to the fact that Game of Life is Turing-complete

sounds like GP is aware of that fact :)

I think that was edited in. Not sure at this point.

You can think of it like that. I think that makes sense.

You can build structures within the GoL rules that implement the GoL rules, so…

I'd say it's certainly in the spirit of a quine. I feel like Hofstadter would love this if he isn't already aware of it.

It needs to be able to compute, but also to be able to place cells in such a way as to 'display' the result one level up.