I don’t see the problem. There seems to be no logical reason that local laws can’t change because of arbitrarily complicated nonlocal rules. You can even see nontrivial examples of this in practice in some modern technology. Various of Microsoft’s operating systems have reportedly contained substantial amounts of code to recognize particular usage patterns characteristic of particular old applications, and change the rules so the old application continues to work even though it depends on old behavior which has otherwise disappeared from the new operating system. Vaguely-similar principles of global patterns changing local decision rules also appear, in less-nauseating ways, in all sorts of software for solving hard optimization problems (optimizing compilers, finding the optimum move in Chess, finding the optimum schedule for a big logistics operation...). What would go impossibly wrong if you rewrote physics with added rules which recognize patterns characteristic of presence or absence of patterns (like “living organism” and “magical incantation”) and which rejigger the local rules as a consequence?
Changing the local rules specifically to stomp out technology without making the rest of the universe’s behavior unrecognizable is a tricky job, since you are correct that everything tends to be cross-coupled in weird ways. But I think one could at least make existing technology pretty frustrating. One way to start would be by making a list of a hundred or a thousand technogically useful patterns (things heating up to combustion temperature, things bending around a fulcrum, sizable things rotating or oscillating many many times without changing shape, lots of energy being stored for a long time in an elastic object) and make case by case hacks to damp them out (spontaneously cooling things when they rise above 100 degrees Celsius, letting the lever soften and bend, etc.) whenever they weren’t preceded by the suitably magically approved pattern of causality. (So, e.g., you can light a fire with a spell, and perhaps by striking suitably hard objects against each other, but not with a match or a magnifying glass. And you can use hinges as long as they are between bones in a living organism.) The result would be a very weird universe, but if I remember correctly (from long, long ago), the universe in those books was supposed to be very weird anyway.
There are only two rules: quantum chromodynamics and universal gravitation, and hopefully they can be united into one. “[I]f you rewrote physics with added rules” is a non-starter.
It is actually quite astounding that so much physical behavior is allowed in such a paltry context. The things that do happen are in an extremely select set of events.
I don’t see the problem. There seems to be no logical reason that local laws can’t change because of arbitrarily complicated nonlocal rules. You can even see nontrivial examples of this in practice in some modern technology. Various of Microsoft’s operating systems have reportedly contained substantial amounts of code to recognize particular usage patterns characteristic of particular old applications, and change the rules so the old application continues to work even though it depends on old behavior which has otherwise disappeared from the new operating system. Vaguely-similar principles of global patterns changing local decision rules also appear, in less-nauseating ways, in all sorts of software for solving hard optimization problems (optimizing compilers, finding the optimum move in Chess, finding the optimum schedule for a big logistics operation...). What would go impossibly wrong if you rewrote physics with added rules which recognize patterns characteristic of presence or absence of patterns (like “living organism” and “magical incantation”) and which rejigger the local rules as a consequence?
Changing the local rules specifically to stomp out technology without making the rest of the universe’s behavior unrecognizable is a tricky job, since you are correct that everything tends to be cross-coupled in weird ways. But I think one could at least make existing technology pretty frustrating. One way to start would be by making a list of a hundred or a thousand technogically useful patterns (things heating up to combustion temperature, things bending around a fulcrum, sizable things rotating or oscillating many many times without changing shape, lots of energy being stored for a long time in an elastic object) and make case by case hacks to damp them out (spontaneously cooling things when they rise above 100 degrees Celsius, letting the lever soften and bend, etc.) whenever they weren’t preceded by the suitably magically approved pattern of causality. (So, e.g., you can light a fire with a spell, and perhaps by striking suitably hard objects against each other, but not with a match or a magnifying glass. And you can use hinges as long as they are between bones in a living organism.) The result would be a very weird universe, but if I remember correctly (from long, long ago), the universe in those books was supposed to be very weird anyway.
The problem is this:
There are only two rules: quantum chromodynamics and universal gravitation, and hopefully they can be united into one. “[I]f you rewrote physics with added rules” is a non-starter.
It is actually quite astounding that so much physical behavior is allowed in such a paltry context. The things that do happen are in an extremely select set of events.