So occasionally I wonder what the human equivalent of the Three Laws of Robotics are. Not in an ethical sense, like the "Three Laws of Humanics" Asimov later put forth (with seriousness varying by account), but from a psychological standpoint: does psychology have any nontrivial, unbreakable laws, the way physics has? (Or seems to. But that way lies solipsism, so let's say 'has'.)

The existence of unbreakable laws of psychology isn't necessarily any more contradictory to the concept of free will than the existence of unbreakable laws of physics, of course; the question of the existence of free will is equivalent to the question of whether or not the system which is a human being is underconstrained by those laws, and to what degree.

Even if there are no "unbreakable" laws, merely stochastic ones, that would still be useful knowledge. If I understand correctly (and I probably don't; I left off at classical electrodynamics), electron motion is exactly like that — and yet we have electric circuits and computers with component failure rates of `10^{-enough}`.

And that leads me to the real reason that I wonder about this, because I'm actually not hugely interested in the details of what any laws of psychology are. The real question for me is whether or not they, like the laws of physics, can support (even in aggregate) a system of universal computation.

Specifically, I want to hack people — not like in Snow Crash, which would probably be impossible regardless of the laws in question, mind. I just want to play Pong on a substrate of minds.

Why, yes, I suppose I am a mad scientist.