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Originally Posted by Alex from Montreal
To the contrary
The program is the universe not the program used by God to create the universe. Discussing the program used by God to create the universe takes you one level higher. There could be a program or some logic used by God to create all this, but we all ready have trouble to understand what we see and will not venture into a discussion of the Divine intelligence.
Scientists don't really care about the programming language used by God. Exactly, that most of you don't care about the programming language used to write vBulletin software or any other program. The program for any end-user is defined by its look and feel. The look is the static interface and the feel refers to the behavior of the software when you click some buttons, submit new data...
Scientists seem to use a similar approach for the universe. This type of external analysis is called black box analysis or functional analysis in software engineering and that's what scientists are doing with the universe.
Some SCIENTISTS, like biologists, will just try to find out the relationship between the inputs and outputs of SOFTWARE. Then, they will just put all this in a big table/database. An input/output table is still a program, but a very long one. Physicists attempt writing more concise programs that capture the SOFTWARE's features using mathematics as a "programming language". So you see, the analogy can be pushed a bit further.
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The analogy still doesn't work. I don't have much time, so I'll keep it short.
The input/output relation may be seen as the very essence of software. Indeed, it is what software is made to do: to produce output in response to input. Therefore, software by its very nature is teleological.
Reality, on the other hand, is not. Everything does produce a certain "output", but that output is not a part of any design. Even when evolutionary "design pressure" is taken into account (that is, that certain structures produce output beneficial to their survival or replication), there is no actual teleological nature to this "design" (thus making the meaning of the term design, if used, entirely different of the meaning when used for software).
Moreover, there is no rational structure behind reality. Rather, rationality is a tool formed by the a-rational structures of reality to study those very structures. Reality itself is neither rational nor irrational, it just
is. What is rational and what is not is defined by its relation to reality. In other words, reality defines rationality, but is not shaped by it.
As for science, I strongly urge you to read some of the works of Latour. Science does not consist of detached scientists studying objects and relations from a distance. Rather, scientists are a part of a network that is both social and cultural (human), as well as non-human. Their very efforts are shaped by an a-rational network, and only through blackboxing of the mediations between the different human and non-human actors does it seem to resemble a functional process that takes input and creates output. However, the a-rational and non-teleological nature of the network makes it entirely different altogether from any sort of software.
Perhaps the kind of software most resembling both science and reality (there is no clear gap between the two, since one is a part of the other) is that which imitates the networks described by connectionism*. However, even here it is a clear problem that this kind of software is still teleological. Furthermore, one can question in how far this kind of software can still be considered software in the traditional sense of the word.
To conclude, software does resemble both science and reality in a way. No big surprise, since software and science are both based in reality (where else?) and shaped by the human mind, which is in turn based in and thus shaped by reality. An analogy between those various things, though, is much akin to one between a table and the space-time continuum. There are shared features and characteristics, yes, but creating an analogy and drawing on it will only serve to create confusion by either obscuring or misinterpreting the differences.
* These networks are not the ones mentioned earlier. The networks mentioned earlier are the ones used in actor-network theory, while the ones mentioned here are the ones used by connectionists in philosophy of mind. There are some very interesting parallels between the two, but I don't have the time to go into those right now - even though they are quite relevant to this discussion.