Have you read "The Politics"? He was a very poor thinker, albeit an eloquent writer and one with social status

I imagine a barely covered lone human-looking guy in the nature of choice, a bit of sunshine, water, dust, and naturally air...

As masque pointed out I think not having a built clock may be one of the greatest setbacks. Our senses can't register the passing of time very well. Another problem is we can't see very small (or distant small-appearing) things. Difficult to reach the theory of relativity under these circumstances. Even if blessed with a solar eclipse during that one day.

A problem would of course be quantum mechanics.

But we are talking a superb intellect here. For a starter, let "it" have an IQ of 1000. As our real world IQs are below 200, with an exponential scale, you know what that means. We aren't just ants compared to it, but IDAs (some advertisement for the thread ). Then of course let it have a memory potential of 10^100 bytes. Our brains have only a few petabytes.

Ultimately it will be about if it will be possible to extract all the things from the noise, with our sensing capabilities. Bacteria and fungi can be figured out when seeing a rotten tree, but exactly how they look is a different matter.

It will take a short moment to figure out how to make fire, deduce it from friction. Let the experiments start!

I am absolutely sure that you cannot use logic and human senses to tell whether luminous aether is or isn't a thing. Luminous aether makes perfect logical sense and is perfectly aligned with what our senses tell us, yet has the small problem of being completely wrong.

/thread?

Yes- I believe that all what has be manufactured by human beings including the greatest innovations have been based on observation of core characterististics of human beings

No not at all. There were strong reasoned objections against the idea of The aether, even before the MM experiment. I do not agree at all that it makes perfect logical sense. It makes "perfect logical sense" with horrible assumptions. Trying to shoehorn something into "wave" or "partical" - the reason for creating the aether - is very stupid - merely one level of assumption questioning higher and the aether evaporates; there is no reason to posit it and an intelligence would not. There are symmetry flaws with the idea among others. It's logically broken before you even test it.

I'm quite sure aether is something an intelligence could easily dismiss.

Good luck with that.

Ummm. No. There weren't strong reasons to believe that there is an underlying thing through which stuff moves. Mostly because it looks exactly* like that to the naked eye.

There were no "strong reasoned objections" to it. Well, unless you consider "strong reasoned objections" to be equivalent to the "strong reasoned arguments" that involve every theory whether it is aligned with reality or not. This includes every theory ever developed, including the ones that have actually stood the test of time.

There is no reason to posit any of physics at all unless you have the experimental apparatus to test it.

That is why they had to do some experiments. You find out whether your logic matches reality by doing experiments. Without the experiments, you cannot tell what is right from wrong.

It is completely idiotic to think that reason alone is sufficient. Putting human senses into the mix just makes it a more idiotic idea. Human senses were developed to find food and to avoid being eaten and occasionally ****. The senses aren't even up to the level of even being considered ill-equipped for the task.

*precisely, 100%, without a doubt, unquestionably, perfectly.

Please don't use that word. Thread has a lot to give if encouraging, not discouraging. Just politely correcting the worst mishaps. And embrace fresh thought, it happens!

NOT [/thread]

I like that you have the balls to take a firm stance here. I am however lead to believe, after having just finished with Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception', that under hallucinogens, a sufficiently intelligent entity could explain the universe. Then again, I can be lead to believe anything when written by Huxley.

You do not need experiments the way we perform them with high technology if you have massive processing power and the ability to do basic experiments without any advanced technology or see the world as an endless experiment anyway. It is possible to understand a lot and develop theories only by using observations and math and simple experiments that the detectors are our senses or similar. I just think however that this is still very hard even for a super intelligence and will take time to decode everything starting from 0 basis.

Yes you will recover properties of elementary particles gradually because they manage to affect macroscopic things eventually in so many different interconnected ways that appear in common things which however almost nobody notices. Indeed a higher intelligence will see connections everywhere. I just disagree it will be trivially easy. It wont. It is still going to take a ton of observations because certain things are hard to notice and require excessive input and manipulation of the environment.

Just solve for me the problem of time keeping for starters. How will you arrive at the laws without time keeping. How will you recover the law of gravity and the motion of the planets without time keeping. How will you develop a theory of electromagnetism without time keeping.

When the machine starts to uncover the world it has nothing to start from. That is a very hard position no matter how smart you are. It will take some time because progress is not dictated only by the intelligence or processing capacities but by the pace nature provides the input in terms of variety and opportunity towards a being that is not many thousands of kilometers long accumulating data from everywhere.

OP: How in general terms does an entity derive the exiatence and properties of subatomic particles using eyes, ears, and thinking about it?

That is a rhetorical question. I'm not really interested in your attempt to answer.

I mean, your claim is simply false:
The aether was basically the groupthink of dickheads who couldn't get past the idea that the something "wavelike" - a weird and idiotic human invention to which they became emotionally and habitually and cognitively attached - could propagate in nothing. All they had to do was go one level higher in questioning their assumptions, but they didn't; so entrenched were their mental models and so low is human intelligence. An intelligence would instantly reject it as a solution for a number of reasons; it is inelegant, unnecessary, and fails at symmetry.

It's my position that your eyes are the experimental apparatus; millions of experiments are happening every second in the real world, and you're seeing the results. A fluid flows a particular way because of its quantum properties, and would look different with different quantum. Light interacts with certain things in certain ways because of the quantum properties of both. Things bends and crumble in certain ways that they wouldn't with slightly different rules. The macro world gives you vast amounts of experimental information every second; humans are just far too stupid to process that into a framework.

I have to think you're trolling here or something, I don't believe you're that daft.

Again, the experiments are in how the real world behaves. That the logical consequences of what we see are invisible to our extremely limited intelligence is irrelevant; we're positing a more capable intelligence.

Again, I'm not saying that. I said that in a white room it could not derive physics; the intelligence is allowed to walk around and observe the world. It's like you're not even grasping where I'm coming from. I could be wrong, but you haven't offered one intelligent objection to my position.

The post above yours answered it:
masque gets it. Stunned that noone else does.
This is the meat I'm interested in - what is the minimum you'd need in terms of say, input or experimental results?

Timekeeping is not a problem. You measure the pace of your own mental actions - you assume you have close to constant processing power - vs what happens in the world. The reason humans are so bad it is because our minds are fuzzy and slow, but if you had a fast mind and near flawless visual memory, you could measure time to a millisecond in hundreds of ways just from what you see in front of you.

Regardless - give him a watch?

I think the guy should have to invent some technology. Hell, extracting iron is doable on a one day basis. But he has to do more than so. How to acquire the fine mechanics for getting a clock is something. Should he build a factory with everything needed? His physical powers will be the limit, not his mental.

But if the guy is a machine to start with, then he may have a processor clocking mechanism for getting a picture of time, if he can tap into his own psyche.

That post didn't answer anything. It literally just assumed the entity could derive all physics by observing macroscopic things as an argument for how the entity could derive all physics by observing macroscopic things.

I do

Remembering all of the positions of the sun will already give quite much. How is the shadow of that treetop moving? Registering how the leaves move in the wind could be a solution for keeping quite exact time. But then you are maybe crossing the border, do you then really have just the senses of a human? The processing power has to work with what our visual nerves produce, but what is our senses? We register fotons, but our brains can't necessarily extract it. Are we "seeing" it or not? We may need to define some of these things. How much can the guy register? But maybe this is a problem of only a few magnitudes, "easy" to overcome for the extraordinary guy.

And now: could a bacteria with enough processing power derive all of physics, and the rest? It senses its surroundings.

A bit harder than the OP, but maybe doable? It may kick it all off from chemistry. For example the Brownian motion will lead it into physics. Possibility to register light is a bonus, but already some sense of heat may be enough.

It was all an attempt (just like all of physics) to explain experimental data.

Without the experimental data, you don't have anything to explain.

And this "idiotic human invention of something being wavelike" stands to this day in physics.

No. They had to do experiments. The model had to be extended to explain various phenomenon that were discovered through (wait for it) experiments. It broke only under the weight of the addition of data that required that the model be tweaked until it broke.

The current models seem rather magical and absolutely ridiculous UNLESS you have failed to disconfirm them using experiments.

Your eyes are absolute **** for the job. For instance, they will tell you that the moon is larger when it is at the horizon than when it is overhead. They cannot even give an accurate representation of what is happening around you. It would be required that your eyes give an accurate 1 to 1 representation of the universe, and believing that is the height of hubris and idiocy.

The first thing that this super-intelligent logical being would recognize is that it better get started on building some accurate measuring devices since it has nothing of the type at the front of its head.

A half-wit would recognize that assumption is unwarranted. Quite a bit more magical than assuming that a good blood-letting will help with a cold.

Why wouldn't lessor intelligence be prone to misperceive and misestimate greater intelligence due to the gap of intelligence?

Also tools are an extension of human sense and reason. It doesn't make reasonable sense to exclude tools because of sense and reason.

Yeah, if the last 50 years of physics has taught us anything its that there were a bunch of arbitrary choices that went into the standard model that don't seem to make any difference one way or another (weak interaction favoring left-handedness instead of right, neutrino masses etc). If you want to say that the universe has to be this way and its possible to figure it out without complicated experiments we're entering cool story bro territory.

No...its pure math. Solutions to a group of partial differential equations found in pretty much every corner of physics. All solutions to wave equations involved some sort of medium until Maxwell, so it made sense to posit one.

If that's its criteria its gonna have a really tough time writing down the standard model Lagrangian.

Yes, but thousands of items of experimental data are incident on human eyes every second.

And it's still completely idiotic - a feeble mind's attempt to fit weird reality with the prejudices of sense-perception.

Kind of like how a dog applies pack thinking to its masters behavior, because that's all it can understand - it is incapable of modeling human thought and behavior in native terms because it lacks the intelligence. Humans don't model other humans behavior in terms of dog-pack thinking, so we don't posit a dog's ridiculous models of human behavior.

This is no different.
Experiments weren't required. You can reject aether through needless absurd complexity and symmetry. You wouldn't even posit it if you can question your assumptions beyond moron-level.

Experiments were required only to change the minds of people who were so rigidly thinking about the world - the aether model was still argued for by "highly intelligent" people well after relativity and the MM experiment. That's how poor human thinking is.

I disagree. They seem neither magical nor ridiculous. Why would base reality conform to human macro-perception? Indeed, it seems very likely that it wouldn't. They only seem ridiculous because of a lack of intelligence and rigidity of thought.

The history of advances in physics is in fact one of overcoming this absurdly moronic, dog-level bias in our minds.
You're still thinking like a human intelligence, who can't simulate, can't hold more than a few concepts at a time. I believe you could derive all of classical physics and a good portion of quantum from merely watching a wave tumble with human eyes.
Firstly, eyes are very very accurate. Let me make this simpler for you since you seem to be getting hung up on irrelevant stuff.

The question is essentially:

How many universes could there be that look just like this one to human eyes, that have different underlying laws of physics?

My contention is zero, or if not zero, one where the underlyings are so substantially similar that nearly all of the derivation would be similar.
It's an assumption easily tested. Humans can create their own timekeeping models which work quite well, observe their own reliability in using those models...and we have fuzzy broken brains with limited internal awareness.

I could easily image something like a sperm whale having human level intelligence, but not having the dexterity for significant tool use.