As gangsta says, yeah, I am sure. Below a certain threshold of input, there is exactly zero output from the sensory organs.

They took a plea bargain. It might or might not be a factor that the judge decided to not dismiss me from the jury.

That's fine with me. Your word choices are your own and you're not the one whose word choices (and thread choices) are being criticized.

I respect your right to try to defend nonsense. But that you choose to defend nonsense does not make you respectable.

Your eyes don't take in a "vast dome." That it exists above is largely irrelevant. Pretty, but completely irrelevant. Have you ever seen a green star? They certainly exist. Too bad you can't see them with your eyes.

Same with all of the spectroscopy data that would be really interesting and absolutely necessary for a half-way decent model of just a wee part of what we know. Because, you know, the simplest model of what can be seen by the naked eye, of course, includes all that data that they eye has absolutely no way of detecting.

I don't doubt it is beautiful. Has nothing to do with your claim though.

Hmm...

http://www.nature.com/news/people-ca...hotons-1.20282
So in principle the human eyesight can detect anything? Say you look at the same spot repeatedly. If you just have enough of time and processing capacity you will be at least another Hale telescope?

Even without this sensitivity you can expect a normally distributed amount of photons coming from an object to a certain spot, for example the retina of your eyes. You just have to register say the +2 SD amount repeatedly for being able to make sense of it, if there are enough brains behind the eyes. We haven't, the fictive (and one day plausible) entity itt has.

Have a feeling I gave us a chance to check this out when I mentioned the subliminal.

i stopped reading here:

everything else anybody else could possibly say on the matter is irrelevant.

a) superintelligent being can get to qm/gr, but
b) it can't test them to see that there's no ether, which in part is what led to einstein giving light an absolute value, using only human senses.
c) but any superintelligent being that is a being (has extremities etc.) would build ways to test its theories in turn.
d) without a way to test theories, the superintelligent being would be stuck between a few internally perfectly consistent theories without a way to reject them.

re: d), think of how it would think of string theory? that's PERFECTLY internally consistent, but which calabi yau shape would it choose to yield the correct parameters (that it doesn't even know b/c it hasn't tested anything).

so either the SI being can build tools to test or it can't (depending on the phrasing of the thought experiment). if it can, it will def come up with everything we have and then some. if it can't, it won't.

No. There's the issue of actual perception. From the article:

Notice how finely tuned the situation is for us to even attempt to measure that a photon was detected. Compare this to, say, turning the lights off in your house at night. Yes, you've got photons hitting your eyes, but you can't see anything.

So it's not enough simply to say "we can detect a single photon" in trying to explain observations of the universe around us.

I don't see why this would be the case. What sort of "processing" do you think the brain is doing? Are you imagining that it's counting every single photon that strikes the eye and can place its origin accurate to the perhaps hundredth of a degree?

Beyond the question of perception, I presume the photon in question would have to be in the narrow band of energy states that correspond to the range of wavelengths of light that human eyes can detect.

I already said that. But I say many supposed random things. Few listen. They are too busy preening themselves in the mirror. Or the cogs and wheels spinning in their brains are misaligned and jam their processing. Or they are sober. The last being the most egregious mistake.

I am regrettably sober

No. They showed that a rod cell (that is the type of cell that doesn't detect any information about color at all) undergoes a change when a photon hits it. That isn't the same as the eye transmitting the information that rod #2123216 had a photon hit it. Many rods are attached to each neuron that leaves the eye, giving irreversibly poor acuity. One rod undergoing one chemical change isn't going to even activate that neuron. And you've got the extremely small range of frequencies that will activate that rod which will annoyingly fail to transmit any information about said frequency to the optic nerve.

Again, the eyes don't send every bit of information that reaches them to the optic nerve, even as something something probabilistic that you could work backwards from to see things that you cannot see. I've now made a hotkey so I don't have to type that bit of information out for the bazillionth time.

Yeah. Subliminal means something different though (as generally used in science fair projects). There is stuff that goes on in your brain that you aren't consciously aware of. It wouldn't get to your thinky-thinky cognitive parts that you can use to intelligently reason with, even if you were really really really really really really really really smart.

There is an app for that.

So a sufficient intelligence to understand and use human sense to a very high degree of potential capability.

Remember, in actual humans, sense varies. Some people even numb their own senses voluntarily.

Visual acuity is a good point, more obvious when having more photons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity

0,5 arc seconds is 1:120 arc minutes = 1: (120x60) = 1:7,200 of a degree. So it's more about a one ten thousandth of a degree than one hundredth. For example Hubble Deep Field checked out about 3 arch minutes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

So, with a sight of 0.5 arch seconds the entity could get 2x60x3 x 2x60x3 = 360 x 360 ~= 130,000 = 130k ~= a 0.1 megapixels image. A bit blurry, but not worthless. But for getting these photons he should have a long life span. Can probably be fixed?

Okay. Now tell me how this relates to a single photon, because perception of a "single fine dark line against a uniformly illuminated background" is much different from identifying repeatedly and accurately the exact location from which a single photon originates in a non-uniform background.

You missed a really. Bad processing on your part. There's an app that makes the correction for you. Send me $ 1,000 and its yours. It is the only one in the world so a grand is really, really a bargain.

I'm just showing the possible potential. The single photon thing is extreme, but usually you are getting more photons. Real world duties call now, but maybe 10 photons in 0.1 seconds can be something to start from. Will look into what the Hale telescope on Mount Palomar can do, built in 1948 and the best telescope until 1993. Then we don't need to throw in Hubble, which appears to be a tough spot even for the entity.

http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar...opes/hale.html

Okay. Good luck with that.

Just remember that we built the telescopes to see things that we struggled to see (or just couldn't see) with just the naked eye. For example, we didn't know that Saturn had rings until Galileo built a telescope and saw it. His telescope probably doesn't have the resolution of the Hale telescope, so maybe a more realistic thing to do if you're wondering what the limits of the human eye are is to think about something extremely practical like figuring out whether you can see Saturn's rings with the naked eye. If you can't do something that could be accomplished with early 1600s technology, I'm doubtful that you're going to have any chance of resolving something that required 20th century technology.

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstud...he-saturn.html

Someone should change the thread title to:

"Could a sufficiently intelligent entity (to which we add new, necessary features everyday) derive all of physics from human senses?

Nice, but I prefer:

"Assuming all physics can be deduced using human senses given enough intelligence, could a sufficiently intelligent entity derive all of physics from human senses?"

Ok, much better!

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary...aturnfact.html

So with the earlier mentioned 0.5 seconds of arc using the incoming photons cleverly would be a piece of cake for detecting the rings.

So then why is it that with the naked human eye, we can't actually see the rings of Saturn? It should be a piece of cake, but we can't do it.

You're not going to take the Tooth route and say "It's because we're stupid" but then what is the actual barrier to us seeing it? People have been staring up at Saturn for hundreds of years. Why does it take a telescope to see the rings?

We don't have a reliable recording system. We should be able to add every observation correctly to the previous for getting it right.

When we look at Saturn we are that stupid we start the process over and over, not comprehending what we saw one tenth of a second ago. The bulge would be there for an entity knowing what to make of it.

You don't think Galileo and many others before him stared up at Saturn night after night before his telescope was completed? You don't think when the early astronomers made detailed records of locations and observations that they really weren't paying to things?

I thought you said you say humans were st... never mind. Intellectual honesty has never been on the table in this conversation.

What you're still doing is pretending like the human eye is a photon-counter. It's not. That's not how the human senses work.

Furthermore, you're continuing to make the mistake of pretending that the perception of a line is like the perception of a dot. And that pretending that being able to detect something like a line means that you can actually resolve full images of a dot of a similar size.

And concluding from the bulge that there's actually a ring of particles around a planet is once again a case of post-hoc rationalization. You know the answer, so it's obvious that any actually intelligent being would know the answer based on the barest hint of information. It's not as if the early astronomers had to watch the planet for an extended period of time and watch a procession over a decade (using telescopes) to observe changes in the shape to gain enough information to come up with models to explain the apparent transition of the shape of Saturn or anything like that.

Oh, wait...

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/saturn.html

So... whatever. Keep watching the skis.