The Digital World

Although often viewed as useful merely for entertainment or professional purposes, digitalized worlds are also useful for illustrating a key truth about scientific matters.  In this context, something is "digital" if it occurs within a plane that exists due to electronics, such as webpages on the Internet or the contents of a video game.  Computer science, thanks to the nature of digital environments, exemplifies how scientific laws are not constant by necessity, while the laws of logic are.

The only intrinsic constraints on a digital world are the inviolable laws of logic: scientific laws can be retained, modified, or removed from a virtual landscape by its creator(s).  Could a programmer make a virtual person or animal float in the air?  Of course.  Could the programmer code wind to have no effect on anything it contacts?  Of course.  There is not a single law of physics that could not be edited or omitted from a virtual world, but no programmer can escape the laws of logic because such a thing is wholly impossible.

Anyone who fashions a digital world (here, world refers not only to substances that are treated as "physical," like objects in a video game, but to all details about a digital reality) acts as the deity of his or her creation.  Like the uncaused cause of the universe, he or she can bend all of reality other than the laws of logic at whim.  It will never be possible for a programmer to make a virtual object or character exist and not exist at the same time, for example, but he or she could certainly alter the scientific laws that govern something like temperature or gravity.

If physics entailed necessary laws, like those of logic, it would be impossible to even conceive of an alternate set of physics.  Of course, it only takes a few moments to realize that our universe could have featured different physics and that the laws of physics could change at any time, however unlikely it may seem.  The laws of physics are at most purely contingent in both virtual worlds and the one inhabited by actual people--that is, they depend on things other than themselves (the programmer(s) or the uncaused cause and natural world respectively).

When examining digital words that differ from our own, one can see examples of logically possible scientific phenomena that have not been actualized in reality.  That which is utterly impossible cannot be portrayed even in entertainment, but that which contains no logical contradictions can be, no matter how foreign to one's experiences it is!  The person who wants to see representations of what life would be like if the laws of physics differed needs only to look to the virtual world.