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.