The point is not that a qualitatively more intelligent being could not design a universe to cancel a qualitatively less intelligent being’s technology, but rather that an unintelligently (randomly subject to anthropic constraints, for instance) selected set of naturalistic laws could not plausibly generate such effects. You could always have a hands-on god individually deciding what happens in each situation (monadology?), but that’s just a kid playing with dolls, not a universe. Also, “things” in modern physics are defined in terms of their relationships to one another, Chalmers’ “pure causal flux”. To change the relationships is to change the things, and to eliminate the relationships is to eliminate the things. For instance, objects have mass and mass a set of relationships to energy and to other massive objects mediated by space-time. You can put God in the mediative role of space-time without any impact, but as soon as God doesn’t obey the same simple set of laws when mediating the effect of mass, in what sense do objects still have mass at all?
The point is not that a qualitatively more intelligent being could not design a universe to cancel a qualitatively less intelligent being’s technology, but rather that an unintelligently (randomly subject to anthropic constraints, for instance) selected set of naturalistic laws could not plausibly generate such effects. You could always have a hands-on god individually deciding what happens in each situation (monadology?), but that’s just a kid playing with dolls, not a universe. Also, “things” in modern physics are defined in terms of their relationships to one another, Chalmers’ “pure causal flux”. To change the relationships is to change the things, and to eliminate the relationships is to eliminate the things. For instance, objects have mass and mass a set of relationships to energy and to other massive objects mediated by space-time. You can put God in the mediative role of space-time without any impact, but as soon as God doesn’t obey the same simple set of laws when mediating the effect of mass, in what sense do objects still have mass at all?