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

[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.)