Originally Posted by invader_tech
That's right Serkat. The way in which I wished to relate these two kinds of laws though was by representing them as a form of "invisible" boundary, whether they be easily breakable man-made laws that rely on motivation in order to maintain, or the boundaries that are created with the design of a program in the environment that the program governs. I'd like to think of the program example as being analogous to the real world (which is open to objection, of course), in that the laws that they represent are enforced differently from social laws.
If a program can be cracked from the outside to the point that all of its laws are circumvented, can that be done with the real universe? Is there some way to go "outside" to accomplish this, from a theoretical standpoint?
Furthermore, any strict rule (including the so far unbreakable, unbendable rules of the universe) does something very specific. They serve to maintain something in the system that they are a part of. We know that the rules of our universe serve to maintain a sort of balance, an equality. One can get no more out of something than they put in. So where does that standard come from, in regards to our universe? The natural laws are consistent throughout our observable material world, so far as we know, much the same way a program's laws are maintained throughout the secondary reality it generates via the use of a processor. From a philosophical standpoint, would the natural laws that govern our universe require maintenance from an outside source?
That last question can imply a number of different things (our world is a virtual world in which the natural laws are the work of the program, or that our world is maintained by super-intelligent dog-people, whatever). The jist of this is that a rule of any kind requires some form of meaning that is given to it in order to exist in the system for which it is a part.
All of this is open to debate, I'd much like to hear what anyone has to think about this.
Thing is, we didn't "create" these universal laws. We just described what we saw. Humans, Newton first, said "Hey, look! Mass is attracted to objects with larger mass!" So we wrote the "laws" of gravity in order to explain it. We eventually got more descriptive, talking about spacetime curvature and such, but the law was still a rationalization of what we saw to comprehend the gravitational force more easily.
In a virtual world, you have your program, which is just a series of bits on a computer chip. Those bits were generated from a series of instructions in assembly language. Assembly language is very hard to write with, so most programmers use another language plus a compiler or interpreter to make things easier. If you understand C++, this might make sense:
while(x = 1)
{
something();
}
In English, this would be put simply as saying that something happens while the value of x is 1. This is not the way the virtual world is written, it is the law a non-programmer would write to describe the series of bits on a computer chip. The code above would run until x stopped being 1, much in the way our world works. Observers inside the program/virtual world would be hard pressed to stop something from happening while x is 1. I, the programmer can't do that either. My best option is to change x to something that isn't 1.
Because of my x = 1 statement, I have created an infinite number of other laws without intending to. I never stated explicitly that something couldn't happen when x was 2 or 3 or 76. But in reality, that is what will happen.
About the outside maintenance thing: taking the software metaphor another step, I wouldn't think the universe needs outside tune-ups. I can run that program and let it sit forever and a day; something will happen while x is 1, something will not happen when x is not 1. Unless the value of 1 changes while I'm not looking, all I had to do was set the original conditions and let it run.
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