On hacking

[davv]

If someone manages to hack reality, I imagine it would look like this. You'd have a lot of very weird, seemingly random actions with no effects whatsoever, then boom!

(Though if you want to think about it, we don't know what really constitutes "hacking" as far as reality's concerned. Since we have no ideal concept of how it should behave, we can't say that this action is legitimate use of the universe's, err, interface, while that action is hacking. But I think anything that would let the person bypass any constraint would count. In the hack above, the player can put any instruction in RAM, and the game's running on a general-purpose computer.)

Comments

[lhexa]

I think that the immediate problem with this line of reasoning is that it thinks of the universe as a computer. I like to imagine that, if there are causality-breaking techniques, they do work in accord with known physics: for instance, you slip out of causality for a moment, but you move slower than the speed of light, conserve energy, and conserve momentum. *grins* But this is all speculative.

[davv]

I'm not really thinking of causality-breaking, but more things like... you do something strange, and a 1x1x1 meter cube of palladium pops into existence in orbit around the Earth; or you find out that information is equally distributed throughout the universe, and so by fiddling with local information, you can make something happen at a distance; or you find a way to thoroughly break the laws of thermodynamics and help yourself to as much energy as you'd ever like.

I suppose my intuition is that if whatever it is you find "plays nice" with the rest, then it's ordinary use of the "API", but if it lets you make an end run around all the ordinary obstacles, then it's probably not.

I do recognize the limitation of the metaphor though.

[draque]

The "at a distance" effect you reference there assumes the myth of simultaneous instants, which isn't compatible with relativity.

[davv]

All of the examples I gave break (or appears to break) pretty serious invariants of the universe.

Being able to instantiate cubes of matter would break the conservation of mass (unless it's taken from somewhere, and then would break relativity unless it's subject to light-speed limits).

Mysterious observable action at a distance breaks relativity, as you mentioned. You can see it in a more direct fashion, too: if it lets you alter something that's far away with less delay than it takes to get there at c, then that doesn't really work too well with relativity.

Finally, free energy makes the laws of thermodynamics go away.

[draque]

Hrm... this might sound semantic at first, but I don't think I necessarily think it's possible to tack down how the universe "should" act. We observe how it *does* act under certain circumstances. If we find that we can create very odd circumstances that make the universe act in ways we haven't seen before, we work to create more complete models of its behavior, rather than announcing that we've found a way to hack it. I can't think of any cause->effect scenarios we could bring up that would break that.

[davv]

In part, that's what I mean by the limitations of the metaphor. If you use a purely describable model of the universe, i.e. one that just takes what is there and tries to reason with it, then you're right. If we discover we're running on a stack machine and you can inject arbitrary code into the computer (to take an extreme example), then we could (and probably would) say "oh, okay, so physical reality is running on a computer and the computer is what really is".

On a more intuitive level, though, I still think it would make sense to speak of "hacking the universe". In that example, what you've hacked is not the real construct of the universe, but some kind of virtualization layer whose abstraction was far from perfect. Yet that virtualization layer is what reality seems like.

Now you can imagine having a series of universes where the virtualization layer is more and more like the underlying layer, and then there's no point (Sorites-like) where I can say that "getting to the underlying layer was hacking in universe X, but now that we're in universe Y where the two layers are just a little bit more similar, it's no longer hacking".

Thus, like the heap that doesn't become un-heap at some well defined number of grains of sand, the idea of when it's hacking and when it's not isn't rigorously defined. It's more an observation that if I saw there being a very limited set of actions through which you could seemingly do the impossible, I'd quite likely think "the universe shouldn't have acted like that". If it were a computer program, the program shouldn't have acted like that.

[davv]

(Oh, and because you mentioned cause and effect, I'd say this isn't about the acausality of libertarian free will. I wouldn't call the existence of free will "hacking the universe". Instead, if this was inspired by anything, it was of the idea of something similar from an AI's point of view: a critter, isolated within a computational system, finding out that if it tinkers with the CPU in just the right way, it can pick up radio signals and discover the existence of something beyond its domain, and from there bootstrap its way into the new world.)