A 'constructed' (?) machine world

We can only talk about the world as, in some minimal sense, following rules. If we lived in a 'lawless' world, we wouldn't be able to say so.

(This doesn't give us an argument for the truth of any specific 'laws', though, except - perhaps - those that make language, minimally, possible).

It is a game of mirrors - we 'look' in the 'world' for laws, and, in so far as we can describe the world at all, we find the laws which make our descriptions possible. These laws, in their turn, can be written down as the code for a machine - we start to think of the world in terms of 'information' and 'algorithms', as though it could 'really be like that'. But this is just another metaphysical metaphor.

And we know this, because we know that no machine constructed in this way could answer certain intelligible questions - such as 'has this machine been properly constructed?' This is the very edge of the machine metaphor. The place where sense and nonsense walk side by side.