I think your example of cockroaches is a good one. It's been determined by a few researchers that insects and other 'lower forms of life' are a more immediate attainable goal. Before you can fly, you must learn to crawl, no?

Would you or anyone really agree that it would be the onus on us to create simply the vessel or container for such a sentience to grow and evolve on it's own though? Given again such an example of a bug that learns new things as it grows to it's environment.

In a new little project of mine, I've decided to see just how far this 'from the ground up' approach can be taken. Remember those little 'Bugs' or 'Life' games you used to be tasked to make in highschool computer science class? Well what if we scaled it up a bit. Not so much for the amusement of watching some overload tamagotchi things that bleep when you have to 'feed it', but instead lets see how well we can simulate the culturing of 'real' digital lifeforms.

Yeah, it's a little laughable when you look at it practically, but lets assume that we build a dedicated server for these things that could be viewed and monitored by remote clients. View only, no not touch or feed the creatures.

At least thats my latest project. It's way inferior to any real life creatures of course, but the idea isn't so much to actually do it than to see how one can or can't do it. I imagine I'll do a great deal of learning how not to do such a thing if at all how to do any of this, but thats science for you, right?

I don't want to get too into my project here as I don't want people to focus too much on it instead of the broader issues discussed here, but this is something that I plan on seriously researching myself over time.

Can a digital creature really evolve and learn and develop past what he was programmed to originally do? Emergence will likely play a large role. This is something that a few enthusiasts/garage researchers such as Matt Buckland over at AI-Junkie.com have looked deep into themselves. I think it's one of the keys to developing any form of artificial 'intelligent' creatures of any kind really.