Machine code is an abstraction, too.

In a Judeo-Christian context, God seems to operate in very abstract terms. "Let there be light" is a highly abstract instruction.

In some other religions and mythologies, there isn't a single God giving the instructions from outside, so it seems difficult to make the comparison there.

Abstraction is like a lever, and by first-order logic there is no way to avoid using an abstraction whenever we communicate, whether internally via vocalized thoughts, via hn or by some really old books. Maybe that's why humans want to believe that abstraction is so powerful. Thankfully, we're not totally wrong.

But thank you for making me imagine a world where the "Let there be light" statement has been meticulously explained in as much detail as possible.

"Then, He realized that adding an extra electron to Hydrogen was not such a good idea; the entire universe shattered, and, after a brief moment of embarrassment, he comforted himself with the fact that no-one will ever know of his folly.

He continued calculating the correct speed-constants for a particle he made called a photon, which wasn't exactly a particle, but it was small and didn't carry a lot of weight, it was everywhere, and it was mostly directional -- so he figured it might be useful for some sort of massively parallel input apparatus, and his creations can use it to understand all sorts of things about their environment and themselves. Eventually, humans will suspect that light is a wave, too; but that wasn't quite right, either. God made is difficult to figure out for copyright protection reasons, but here's a hint, and get your notebooks out: ..."

> "Let there be light" is a highly abstract instruction.

The more I think about this, the more I realise it might be the most abstract instruction. It's actually kind of beautiful.

I once worked in a company that used a similar approach. So, for example, the "chief architect" would file a bug in the tracker titled, "Product X does not exist". It would then be up to the engineers to "fix" it by creating the product.

No wonder Satan rebelled. ~

That itch you're feeling is the itch I feel when I write in a LISP. Other programming languages make up too many of their own rules and get in the way.

But those are just feelings, and if you forget that, you'll bring yourself into a manic state. heh.

In python you can do

  pip install light

and it installs all the requisite dependencies. Awkwardly, god runs as root and doesn't bother with virtual environments, so there might be some bugs due to version creep

The only naturally-occurring programs we are aware of are written in genetic code and the way in which they run is arguably not even Turing-complete. Recent papers have suggested ways to construct a Turing-complete system using DNA but it seems that such a system doesn't exist in the real world.

So yes, God's apparent method is writing self-modifying spaghetti code straight to the metal.

Perhaps the universe is a LISP machine that interprets His code directly? No need to assume x86 derivatives when dealing with the Infinite.

If we're discussing what a divine being might write the universe in, my vote is not for direct code. Instead, imagine writing something as immense as the universe, you'd want the universe to emerge from simple rules such as basic IFS [1], L-Systems [2], or multi-dimensional cellular automata [3].

There is actually some preliminary research findings giving evidence to cellular automata underpinning the creation of the universe, as part of the Wolfram Physics Project [4].

[1] https://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/ifs.html

[2] https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/cbyrd/pres1...

[3] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.ht...

[4] https://www.wolframphysics.org/

The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Clearly, the universe is written in Forth.

Or rather a dialect of it, which has only one fundamental word, and everything else is implemented in terms of that word. How exactly is it done? That's the ineffable part.

You're thinking about programs, not computation.