the program-world

Mair has a good post up today talking about religion and sociology, and how sociology often can't examine religious cultures honestly if it presupposes God's non-existence.

I had a slightly similar thought the other day about Computer Science. Ok, so it wasn't really similar at all, but I had a thought about God and computer science, and that's sort of like God and sociology. Right?

In computer science, we write programs (duh.) The programs these days are made out of unique pieces, called objects, and it's the programmer's job to define the objects and how they can relate to each other. For reasons I won't go into, it's important in a good program that objects not be allowed to interact with each other outside of these sorts of determinate, well-regulated sets of interactions.

The programmer, on the other hand, can see things from a much different perspective, and instantaneously write in any sort of interaction he or she required. The programmer could even start breaking all sorts of "rules" in the program, and interact with objects in ways the objects themselves don't "know" are possible.

In the spirit of Flatworld, I began to wonder what it must be like for my programs to see me change the way their world works. Here they are, going about their business, displaying images and reading databases and parsing text, and suddenly, something changes. Something happens which doesn't seem possible; something that breaks the rules and defies their reason; something that, technically, according to every piece of information they could ever fathom, is completely impossible. They must be baffled.

Some of them probably assert that the rules were never broken. The program is absolute, they believe, and so whatever happened must have a logical explination within the bounds of what the rules allow, or possibly due to some rules they haven't discovered yet. But ultimately, the rules persist, and cannot be broken. These are the program-materialists; the empiricists and modernist thinkers who assert themselves over everything. Some other group, the believers, think I am breaking the rules, and these people sing my praises, write cheesy songs, and where "W.W.R.H.D." t-shirts. Some of their more misguided pagan members probably sacrifice their program-children on program-alters in confused attempts to keep the program-sun rising each program-morning.

So, maybe it's like this for God. Maybe he wrote a consistent set of rules and relationships and interactions, and sometimes he messes around with them, and we inside this little program world are completely confused by it. It seems like I've heard something like this said a few times before, but thinking it up on my own about computer science gave it more relevance to me this time.

Anyway, as a reward to those of you who've made it to the end of this post, here's the funniest Borat video clip I've ever seen. I think it's even better than the movie: