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Generalized: There's no way to know which Turing Complete substrate we are "truly" running on. We can examine the parameters of our system and hypothesize which rules are the most parsimonious to produce the system we live in in the Occam's Razor sense, but we can't prove it.

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How about triggering a buffer overflow? Assuming the Turing Complete substrate doesn't have infinite memory, maybe we can break out ;)

Just be careful you don't overwrite the stack canary and end up getting the whole universe terminated.

The idea has been explored in "the literature", which in this case is a really fancy-pants way of saying "science fiction". In the general case, since we can't figure out what the consequences of a crash are, I don't think I'd recommend it, but if we can get specifics, who knows?

One easily-linked example: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/

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