In a digital computer, wires have one of two states, 0 or 1. This is not natural, however – many possible voltages can be put on the wires, but only a small subset of these possible voltages ever occur inside a digital computer, being those voltage values which can be unambiguously interpreted as either 0 or 1. This is a design goal – the components of a digital computer work in such a way as to maintain the interpretability of the wire voltages, and also to maintain the interpretability of the transistor physics as logic gates.
This idealization of the computer’s voltage states is used to standardize the components and the component interactions. That standard behavior then forms the basis for logical induction, such that we can design circuits which as a whole have too many possible states to exhaustively test, yet can be known to be correct by virtue of the correct interactions between its parts. The whole can be known to be correct because the parts are correct. There are many devices that can be interpretable as logic gates – different implementations of the same idea. Implementations include domino tiles, water channels, game of life, wooden blocks. The reason we choose silicon is because silicon devices maintain interpretability even at high frequency, and can be made very small.
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Economists have theories about how economics processes work, and many of these theories start with assumptions like “no transaction cost” and “no externality”. These don’t have to be taken as passive observations about reality. Rather, they should be taken as conditions worth bringing about, because of their utility in market processes.
One case which interests me greatly is the government intervention used to create the neutrality of money. Brad Delong describes Keyne’s General Theory as trying to make Say’s Law true.