The Scientist of Blocks: a fable about virtual worlds, code and reality

There are worlds I build with code and close at the end of the day.

They do not exist in the physical sense of the word, but they are not just files on a computer either. Sometimes they are born locally, inside a Docker container running on my own machine. Sometimes they live in a staging environment, isolated from the world, like small laboratories where everything can break without consequences. And sometimes they cross that invisible border, move to a server, to cloud infrastructure, to Amazon AWS or to some other remote place, and begin to work for real. They stop being just code running in a controlled environment and become inhabitable spaces: places where other people enter, browse, buy, book, ask questions, work or make decisions. Virtual worlds that cannot be touched, but that begin to produce effects in real life.

From the outside, they may look like just websites.

But from the inside, they work like small worlds.

They have rules.
They have limits.
They have possible paths and blocked paths.
They have visible areas and areas nobody sees.
They have consequences.

Someone enters, clicks, buys, books, asks a question, requests a service, leaves their data or makes a decision. Something that seemed virtual ends up producing a real effect. A sale. A conversation. A project. An invoice. Even my own salary.

Then I close the editor, turn off the screen, and that world keeps running.

That idea has always felt strange to me.

Because we work with things that are intangible, but that still change reality. We create structures that cannot be touched, but that organise human actions. We design environments that exist inside a screen, yet affect the world outside it.

Perhaps that is why the border between the virtual and the real has never seemed so clear to me.

And perhaps that is why, while playing Minecraft with my son, I began to look at that world of blocks in a different way.

Not as just a game.

But as an environment with its own internal rules. A closed, logical, limited space where everything seems understandable as long as you accept its conditions. A world where you can build, explore, measure, survive and learn patterns. But also a world that, when seen from a certain distance, begins to suggest larger questions.

What does it mean to understand a system from within?

What happens when the rules we use to think are part of the very world we are trying to understand?

Where does a reality end when we cannot step outside it to look back?

Out of that mixture of technical craft, virtual worlds and philosophical questions came El científico de los bloques.

A short fable inspired by Minecraft, but not exactly about Minecraft.

It is the story of a scientist who lives in a world made of blocks and tries to understand it with the tools he has: observation, reason, language and patience.

I did not want to write a treatise. I wanted to write a simple fable. A small story to speak about something that has always stayed with me: the limits of what we can know when we are part of the same system we are trying to explain.

Deep down, perhaps we all live a little like that.

Inside an environment that works.
Inside rules we learn.
Inside a language that allows us to think, but also limits us.

El científico de los bloques is now available on Amazon.
https://amzn.eu/d/03tNpqVq

The book ends.
But the questions do not.