So could his brain, which is controlled by and made up of the same stuff as everything else in the universe, figure out the laws physics laws that his brain's components are following, through pure thought?

That is backwards. Modeling is data fitting. Experimentation is how you attempt to disprove your model* by determining what other implications your model has and checking whether nature agrees or disagrees.

It is not important that the world contains a lot of data. The eyes are piss-poor at what you think they are capable of doing. The fovea centralis of a health eye only covers about 1% of your visual field.

It is faulty eyes that are the problem. We are forced to use a huge portion of our brain to fill in information** that the eyes are incapable of gathering.

That is incorrect. The human eye has about 126 million light detecting units in total. The sensitive part (the fovea centralis) covers 1% of your visual field. Look at the "e" in "centralis" above (I made it bold to make it easy) and without moving your eyes, tell me how many of the surrounding words you can read.

Your thought experiment would be more worthwhile for getting this hyper-intelligent being to organize your family vacation photos, I think. He could move his eyes around in an optimal manner and it would only be a matter of seconds before he could memorize each one.

You cannot be a good observer without the proper tools. And being a good observer isn't even close to good enough unless you are going to rely on silly unreliable heuristics.*** For instance, there is no a priori reason to believe that universe is required to be symmetrical or parsimonious. Those are silly assumptions that any self-respecting hyper-intelligent being would reject within the first millisecond of being conceived.

*models, really. This hyper-intelligent being would come up with gazillions of possible models based on what it sees. I'm not nearly as smart as this imaginary creature, and I can come up with quite a few that are perfectly aligned with what I see.

**by "fill in information" I mean "make **** up out of nothing other than heuristics." To head off a possible counterargument: If the brain didn't do the work of using these heuristics, the eyes would be completely useless. IF this hyper-intelligent being is also so highly skilled at introspection as to discover these heuristics, it will quickly realize that it doesn't really see much that it can justify as being a one-to-one reflection of the world. Therefore it has much less visual data than even you incorrectly think that you have.

***parsimony (and other heuristics) is (are) quite useful if you are a normal human who wants a decent model for the purpose of trying to get by in the world, but it has nothing to do with the search for how the universe actually works.

The human eye is very limited in what it can actually see of the electromagnetic spectrum:

http://physics.tutorvista.com/waves/...-of-light.html

And what of this could you tell with just a human eye?

I could probably discover cheese. Has nothing to do with what the rest of you said, but I oftentimes forget to put the milk away.

It is important to note that the OP made a strong claim. Finding one problem with the claim is sufficient. More is just needlessly piling on.

a) You haven't found a problem with the claim, you've merely presented your rather strange assertion that incoming data isn't experimentation, which is lol on several levels

b) The question was two parts - if you disagree, what is the minimum "extra" you'd need. OK - let's say neutrinos (I don't concede that, but let's say). Now what?

First of all i was talking about establishing with macroscopic observations that weak interactions use left handed neutrinos (P and C violation in the papers). People in this thread have taken the position you cant spot properties of particle physics from macroscopic observations and i reject that in principle, moreover of course the fact i recognize how harder you make your life that way. You can spot neutron stars having some pretty large speeds in terms of the rest of the galaxy because in there is a very strong magnetic field the neutrinos with spin etc will due to parity violation produce asymmetries when ejected taking a ton of energy/momentum with them during the collapse phase. Suddenly the neutron star has big recoil speed rather than having it cancel in case of symmetry.

So go ahead now and take yourself near a neutron star and observe it move fast lol compared to the background. If you put yourself at the proper position you can spot the compact object pass very fast from a certain range in the sky you are observing eclipsing fast a few stars if you have the perfect position for it plus you will see them bend spacetime too lol to know its not some other dark object closer.

You can most certainly notice a fast moving object that passes by and see the impact of the fast gravitational scattering in your observatory.

You do not in principle need to have high instruments unless you constrain yourself to be on earth at all times.

Even then i will go ahead and claim just to defend the principle here that an asymmetry of such size will impact even nucleosynthesis in some model specific manner that will impact the distribution of isotopes in our planet.

You need high technology to separate and study isotopes but in principle you can get away with primitive means if you have enough time and huge processing power of what you visually observe.

Could 10,000 quite good chess players rated 1800 or so, consult only with each other and having a month to decide on each move beat Kasparov? I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

The chess analogy is probably true (that its hard to replicate with less) although if they took time and communicated they might come close to seeing the best move almost always (and were say top 1000 level grandmasters but far below the world champion still as individuals ie they lose 100% of the time against them in all matches and even rarely get a draw or win one game).

However it is possible today to claim a breakthrough synthesis in Physics can happen if you take 10 very smart well educated people together and make them true friends and share their top ideas 24/7 and teach each other what they know without the fear of losing to competition that keeps people defensive and secretive. An absolute honest friendly exchange of top ideas can deliver the miracle by a collaboration or because one builds on the ideas of others and suddenly the breakthrough concept comes to that brain easier even if alone at it (at that moment) but precisely because the others took his/her mind in a very interesting trip recently that wouldn't have gone alone.

Keep in mind that the same may not be true in abstract mathematics although frequent collaboration of top brains did result to the eventual progress in Fermat's theorem that allowed the last guy to go the distance. In very abstract topics it may be indeed too hard to compare with the top brains and their ability to imagine proofs. But in Physics Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman, Dirac etc didnt have pathological brains (not like Ramanujan or Godel or Von Neumann or modern ones like Pelerman etc). They had effective IQ near 160-170 and this can be approximated by 10 155s or 160s that cooperate fully and certainly by 100 if they wanted to put the effort in some scientific society paradigm that there is no stupid selfishness for who wins the whole fame first.

It is amazing how much your brain produces if others step in to help the discussion without any stress to protect their own fame goals. In fact all it takes is to talk to your wife that is also a physicist say and suddenly you are reaching more ideas. Einstein benefited by his first wife for sure.

How are you going to leave the Earth without the use of tools? Seems against the spirit of the OP.

No. I've made the claim that eyes are ****ty at the data collection.

It is up to you to present strong arguments for your position (hyper-intelligent being wandering around would find that neutrinos must exist) since you are making a positive claim. JAQing (see bold) isn't even presenting an argument, let alone a strong one).

No. It is directly disallowed by the conditions set by the OP.

The thesis is that a hyper-intelligent being has eyes for looking and feet for walking and is to prove all of modern physics (and no alternative theories remain) by wandering around.

The eyes are an amazing data collector. I really have no idea what you're talking about. How many megabytes/second of high fidelity data enters our field of view?

Besides which, a rainbow proves refraction. The size and nature of animals and plants, properties of particle physics. A butterfly for example isn't pigmented.

If you're smart enough, your eyes provide sufficient data to derive all of physics prior to 1900 to very high accuracy, just from watching waves crash for a minute.
It flows mathematically into our rigid, stupid, sense-perception derived mental model of stuff vibrating other stuff up and down vs hard objects. Neither visualization is correct and are in fact mental blocks to understanding what's going on.

It's a little more fundamental than that. You have two options:

- Posit an aether to keep your mental model of the wave
- Posit a vacuum and realize the mental model of the wave has no basis in reality

There was no experimental data to pick to first over the second. The choice of the first is pure dog-level intellectual/habitual bias. An intelligence isn't making the mistake of shoehorning what we see into the narrow categories of what we're comfortable thinking about (waves vs particles, energy vs matter).

You really think this is a good objection? Symmetry is not about what objects look like, but how the base laws and substrates must be in order for the universe to even exist.

The point however is that a) there is already plenty of data that must be explained, we simply can't process a tiny fraction of it with our feeble minds, and instead habitually group it into very, very crude and low resolution mental models and b) there are deep logical/mathematical connections between the results of those observations that human minds are too daft to see.

Look at how long it took us to go from special to general relativity. That's an instant derivation for an intelligence. That's an example of something logical we found, quite straightforward, yet it took many years. What about the stuff that's harder? What do you think we're missing about the structure of the world with our just-above-dog-level brains?

Are there mirrors in the world we can't comprehend, like cows? Are there necessary truths that we can't comprehend, like a child with higher mathematical concepts? Where are the limits of what humans can do vs the likely limit of what *something* can reliably derive from pure reason? I think it's highly unlikely to humans are magically at the point where more intelligence doesn't reveal whole new realities and necessary structures in the universe and in logic that we can't now see. It does for each step of insects -> reptiles -> dogs -> us, on an extraordinary scale. Why do you think the next step up won't do the same and open up whole new understanding?
That is a reasonable point, and one I use against people who criticize those from other ages, but it's not something I've fallen into. If you can't instantly see that the aether is an absurd idea - and many of that age did see it was absurd, the criticisms went all the way to outright mockery - I don't know what to say. You don't have mental clarity on this topic? You don't understand how ideas are formed? It's obvious the aether was posited because it was easier to conceptualize than a bizarre world which noone can get their head around in which something isn't a wave and isn't a particle but behaves like both. But their is no reason the second isn't likely to be true. In fact, it is more likely to be true than the aether. Why? Because it posits less, and questions unreasonable base assumptions.

Or after wandering around it sits and thinks about physics for an undetermined amount of time. Does it take breaks?

I think the data would be too unreliable and narrowly scoped, but it's an interesting idea (is there an initial arrangement of atoms possible that solves physics by self rearrangement with no external input?) At some point you're actually manipulating/experimenting with matter directly vs using your intelligence. It's a hard distinction to draw though.

The arguments against the aether as presented here are incredibly superficial and resulted oriented imo. If people who don't seem to understand Maxwell's equations tell you the aether is trivially false its hard to take seriously. Then there is sort of a mindless appeal to symmetry as an argument against the aether, but given the universe at a very fundamental level treats objects different from their mirror images, it seems like any symmetry principle needs to be tested.

Of course you can just say that if you're smart enough its obvious the aether violates a symmetry the universe preserves and that parity conservation in classical physics can't possibly be an exact symmetry....but at that point you can just say anything.

Semi grunching here, but I assume the answer is no. If we were to build a machine with super AI, nearly infinite memory and processing speed, but only give it access to the human visual spectrum, sound, smell, taste and touch, I don't think it could ever prove QM or even that there are other galaxies, and so it would be crippled and would not discover much of physics without access to the tools we've used.

More to the point, it's not clear how you prove to yourself that relativity is correct and the ether theory is bunk without experiment.

You can come up with any theory at all with zero empirical data, but you have no way to test any of them.

You guys are basically rewriting history at this point. The aether was a ******'s invention and the rigid minds of the 1800s clung to it because they couldn't imagine anything other than something which was relatable to their own prejudices. That was a common failing in thought back in those days; we're more nuanced and intelligent now, at least when it comes to that. Some commentary:
It was openly mocked as being philosophically absurd, and it was inelegant to the point of being ridiculous (perhaps that's a better word than symmetry? Does it get the point across?)

Perhaps there is a good example of what Brian is trying to say, but he picked perhaps the worst possible theory to hoist his point on.

I think the most intelligent entity in the universe would understand what it could not acheive with our pitiful earthly senses, and instead focus on drinking lots of scotch.

What's interesting is that the OP's conjecture has already been tested and found wanting. See the Ionian philosophers to other Greek philosophic schools that existed, and from which the word atom is derived.


What is more interesting is, if through the process of natural selection and eons of time, a being could evolve that would be able to directly detect say, a neutrino or see Planck length. Perhaps a space alien already exists with these capabilities, a combination of DS, Masque, and Kasparov, with super senses. Further, humans postulated such a being long ago and gave it a name: god.

It seems relevant that your position is also being openly mocked as philosophically absurd and inelegant to the point of being ridiculous.

It's worth noting that a data collector is pretty useless without a processor to process it. What we conceive of as "human senses" includes that processing. That's part of the "tool."

Also, most of the data that's collected is redundant.

You are completely wrong Zeno; feeble philosophical objections have been raised, but it hasn't been tested experimentally. How could it? And after all the griping about eyes not being experimental testing, surely words aren't either?

It's been questioned by a psychologist who I don't think quite grasps the premise of the OP and thinks kind of rigidly about evidence/science; his objections aren't even coherent. Some of the physicists think it's not a bad idea, some don't like it. I'd say it's 50/50 among physicists.

Anyway, masque answered the question beautifully in that long post, which was what I was looking for. The op isn't as much about a position as an exploration as to what extent worlds could be identical but with different underlying physics.

I think ultimately we'll find there's an abundance of macro evidence on Earth to precisely determine the underlying physics of the reality we live in. How could there not be, given the age and level of recording all over Earth of both cosmic and local events? Given the fact that everything we see is built of that underlying physics? Given the fact that life is a highly complex quantum-based machine, whose fine tuning provides large amounts of evidence of various properties of physics? There's no way humans understand even a fraction of how those things inter-relate, or the pattern of evidence they'd leave, that would be more accessible to a mind that isn't slightly above a dog's.