God Seen as A Programming Wizard

[Quotealex]

Scientists and specifically physicists have been struggling over many centuries to decipher the secrets of nature. Scientific theories are never complete. New theories always come to complete or refute previous ones. After reading a physics book recently, the analogy between God and programming came to my mind.

Imagine that God is a programmer. That He wrote the universe(s) like any programmer would write a software. However, God did not disclose the source code of his program. We don't even know what programming language did God use to accomplish his task. Galillee once said that God used mathematics to write the universe, but this has yet to be proved.


Early physicists and philosophers struggled to find out this source code. They just wanted to access the absolute truth, the writings of God. Many physicists like Isaac Newton were very pious and their scientific work had sometimes religious motivations. As centuries went by, some physicists learned to be more humble and others became atheists. Most contemporary physicists are just trying to build models that mimic the behavior of the universe.


Physicists look like some programmers who are trying to write a software whose behavior is as close as possible to the SOFTWARE, that is to nature. The programming language used in this project is mathematics.


Newton suggested his classical mechanics to describe the motion of planets, stars and any other bodies. The program written by Newton had a very similar behavior as the SOFTWARE, as was verified by experimentalists. Maxwell added a module to this program to take into account electromagnetic phenomena.


By the end of the 19th century, some physicsts tried to test the Newton-Maxwell program with a new set of test cases. This set included bodies that moved at light speed. The tests did not go through which meant that the Newton-Maxwell program was boggy. Einstein fixed this bug by suggesting relativity, a generalization of Newton's mechanics. The resulting program is known as classical physics.


At about the same time, other experimentalists looked at other features of the SOFTWARE, that is microscopic phenomena. Classical physics failed to mimic these phenomena and a brand new program was written. This program is known as Quantum physics. Some components were though used to build the new software which is also known as modern physics.


As years went by, the new program failed to mimic some features of SOFTWARE. Physicists kept adding new features to get rid of the discrepencies between their product and God's software. They defined particles spins, particles colors, flavors, strageness...Just abstract concepts that allow taking into account the results of newer experiments.


These new concepts are very similar to patches that some software companies publish after releasing their products. Who is not familiar with Microsoft patches? This led some people to think that quantum physics is not a homegeneous theory by itself but a collection of various concepts.


As all computer engineers know, when you lack knowledge about the problem at hand it is very likely that you will produce some sloppy and bogus code. Code quality also drops down when the software gets more and more complex. This seems to be exactly the case of quantum physics. Some reverse engineering might be needed to clean up the theory.


Amen.

[Luc]

Sorry, but the average GFYer (including myself) will not read it due to length.

So, please summarize in 1 sentence.

[mrthumbs]

Originally Posted by Luc

Sorry, but the average GFYer (including myself) will not read it due to length.

So, please summarize in 1 sentence.

Morons should skip this thread in the first place

[tyler.]

thats a lot of characters !

[Furious_Female]

Being engaged to a software programmer, I can easily see the parallels in the universe and agree.

Most of nature's design flaws are in the human mind and body

[drama]

Originally Posted by Furious_Female

Being engaged to a software programmer, I can easily see the parallels in the universe and agree.

Most of nature's design flaws are in the human mind and body

His flaw was creating humans.


Everything in the world is perfectly balanced so that its a closed ecosystem with the exception of us. We've destroyed any sort of harmony which existed.

[madawgz]

too long to read, im sure it was something important

[czarina]

boy, wouldn't we be freaked out if one day we found out that we are all just code in a computer?

[travs]

there is no spoon...

[mardigras]

Originally Posted by madawgz

too long to read, im sure it was something important

Patience is a virtue.
I suspect you miss many important things in day to day

[Quotealex]

Originally Posted by Luc

Sorry, but the average GFYer (including myself) will not read it due to length.

So, please summarize in 1 sentence.

It takes less than 2 minutes to read...

[JD]

http://whatisthematrix.com/

[Libertine]

1. There is no reason to assume that God exists.
2. The analogy between software and science is a very bad one. Read some Kuhn and (especially) Latour. Networks of humans and non-humans are a much better way to describe science.
3. It is only natural that programming languages in a way resemble science and reality as we experience and perceive it. After all, they are all (based in) reality as we experience and perceive it.

[Quotealex]

Originally Posted by punkworld

2. The analogy between software and science is a very bad one.

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.

[Libertine]

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.

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.

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by punkworld

I don't have much time, so I'll keep it short.

I should start listening to myself

[sickbeatz]

Originally Posted by czarina

boy, wouldn't we be freaked out if one day we found out that we are all just code in a computer?

i'd expect compensation big time

[sickbeatz]

Originally Posted by czarina

boy, wouldn't we be freaked out if one day we found out that we are all just code in a computer?

for all we know, the particles that make us, this world, this galaxy could just be a bunch of 1's and 0's in a whole different kind of language we couldn't dream of comprehending.. or not.

[sickbeatz]

Originally Posted by punkworld

The analogy still doesn't work. I don't have much time, so I'll keep it short.[/size]

You should do some reading on AI technology and where it stands today

[Quotealex]

Originally Posted by punkworld

I should start listening to myself

You should. LOL.
I'm going to my favourite French bookstore and might pick out one of Bruno Latour books if they have it on stock.

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by Alex from Montreal

You should. LOL.
I'm going to my favourite French bookstore and might pick out one of Bruno Latour books if they have it on stock.

We Have Never Been Modern is a good one, as is Pandora's Hope. Good reading

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by sickbeatz

You should do some reading on AI technology and where it stands today

I keep up with philosophy of mind, and thus am more or less forced to keep up with AI. Because of that, I happen to know that things like externalism and embodiment are starting to gain a more and more prominent position within AI. Things like that, however, go fully against the idea of a basic underlying all-encompassing software. Moreover, the ever-increasing success of artificial neural networks indicates that traditional software structures do not fit reality quite as well as structures which are more flexible and manage to adapt themselves (both internally and structurally) to the situation.

In other words, the traditional view of software is one which is essentially limited, and only seems to suit a relatively small part of reality.

[Scootermuze]

Originally Posted by Alex from Montreal

Some reverse engineering might be needed to clean up the theory.

The one major thing to reverse engineer.. or turn the timing around would be the Sun..

If you take the current shrinkage per century, then expand it by that much for each previous century to a point where it would be too large for any life to exist on Earth..

This could pose an argument as to when life could have begun.. or at least when it could have been possible..

Of course this is the scientific side of it... God could have created the Sun at a given size already; making things all nice and tidy..

That's one of the programming problems that can't be determined...

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by Scootermuze

If you take the current shrinkage per century, then expand it by that much for each previous century to a point where it would be too large for any life to exist on Earth..

This could pose an argument as to when life could have begun.. or at least when it could have been possible..

Unless, of course, life did not originate from earth. For example, bacteria could have arrived with asteroids, and have developed on earth.