No. Extremely small angle of halfway decent acuity (1% of the visual field can detect data at up to 36 arcsec). Extremely small range of frequency detection and most of the visual field gives only brightness rather than frequency. The information it detects varies wildly with what previous information it has detected. Information about the small range of frequencies detected that exits the eye only a derivative* of frequency and not the actual frequency.

I am aware of the fact that you have no idea of what I'm talking about.

I'm going to assume that the rest of your post requires that eyes are different than they actually are and will need to be rewritten to take into account actual known facts about the human eye before being worthy of a quick read and response.

*since this will confuse most people, 12. Now determine the exact equation that I used to come up with the number 12.

The aether also came about because people were worried about action at a distance with things like gravity and electromagnetism. And they were completely correct to be worried about it. The actual answer we have now (virtual gauge bosons) would also be considered even more philosophically absurd and inelegant to the point of being ridiculous....right empty space is teaming with all sorts of particles that can't even in principle be observed.... if not for all the experimental verification. I think if you actually understood this stuff you'd be less inclined to think results oriented philosophical prejudices are actually useful and have more respect for reasonable ideas that happened to be wrong.

The thing I love most with this thread is op pointing out how stupid we the humans are in sometimes every second sentense, sometimes once in a paragraph.

Keep up the good job!

The problem is they probably would vote about the best move, and that would be very easy to outsmart for the big K.

I could dedicate my whole ****ing life to shaping one experiment into working, alternatively going as deeply as possible into one abstraction. Having 9,998 of my likes doing about one of these things each (naturally communicating 100%) wouldn't need the last remaining guy to be even as smart as me for coming up with something great, if he got to make the conclusion.

Logical Fallacies Argument-from-Ignorance and etc

A useful analogy for the thread and OP is that Mr. Tooth has gone trout fishing in one region of Colorado for one week. And he now thinks that he is an expert at trout fishing anywhere in the world. Indeed, at any type of fishing anywhere in the world.

It would be interesting to postulate who is the most abysmal poster about science: Carlo or Mr. Tooth. But a more useful process of your time would probably be in reading a good book or downing a good scotch.

Is this where I link you to the Strawman Argument of Argument From Ignorance Fallacy?

Come on, Zeno.
If I knew the answer to the questions, I wouldn't have started the OP
You just dislike me because of my politics; the OP and the discussion it generated is an excellent contribution to SMP (thanks mostly to masque applying his mind to it).

They seem quite cogent to me.

This is called confirmation bias. You find the one person who is willing to chase the rabbit trail with you and you follow them all the way as if there's actually something at the end of it.

And you're complaining about revisionist history from others?

The question can use some improvement and stupidity feedback is noise, but it's a potentially a good question with meaningful answers.

Of course it does. You think in the same way: that goes in that box and this goes in this box and you can't put things in this box that belong in that box! I see it with 3 year olds and I see it with grown men.

"Of course science is experimentation! That's what I've been taught!" is what you guys are saying. But it's ridiculous. Science exists as it does because we have incredibly faulty and easily fooled minds, not because there's some property that makes deliberate experimentation different to passive observation. The difference is a mental fault check and nothing more, in system where the overwhelmingly weak link is the mind, memory and processing power of the observer. We need to isolate things down to tiny units to get anything reliable, because our minds are so faulty and slow and only capable of tracking a few things at once.

According to Brian, watching light bounce off a mirror and then analyzing that with a high intelligence isn't science, but making a prediction and then bouncing that same light off and observing and analyzing the exact same data in exactly the same way, now that's science.

It's absurd. Masque gets it. Brian doesn't. Symmetry again.
There doesn't always have to be something at the end; sometimes the exploration of a superficially absurd idea - put forth as likely in order to invoke a reaction in rigid sleepy minds - results in interesting outcomes (provided the minds aren't too rigid).

I think it's interesting to explore how much we could figure out about the world, what structure we could see that's currently hidden from our low intellect if we were far more intelligent but had the same physical limitations. You don't? That's not a problem. It's an out there and maybe fruitless way of thinking about things (or not?), but the nonsense you're starting here is like turning up a Jazz festival and complaining you don't like Jazz. Dude, you don't get it. You actually don't get it.

The post was actually inspired by this:
Knock all the AI nonsense out and you're left with - what is possibly invisible to us? Much of the world and most of what humans think and grasp is invisible/inaccessible to dogs - why are we the final line? It seems unlikely that we would be.

Nobody is claiming we are the final line. But you have chosen among the worst possible ways to explore the actual question because instead of actually asking the question you've created some sort of alternate universe scenario that doesn't really do much of anything. Here's the question you asked:

Then you put forth some exceedingly bold (and unsupported/unsupportable) claims:

And then you made all sorts of stipulations:

And then you started making rather unusual defenses of positions involving the real world and the real history of science. Look at what you're trying to claim about human eyes. You've now tried to turn the human eye into virtually an infinite processor that handles all of the information that goes into it... but your stipulations have always been about "human senses" which includes a human brain for processing that can't process all of the data.

Mostly, you set yourself up for failure in this thread and have reaped the rewards of it.

We need to realize here that humans cannot rewind and review a tape of what the eyes recorded for years or even seconds. But if the brain has the ability to collect and keep faithfully data (the high intelligence thing and super processing of data property) then imagine how much information exists in a room that you observe the shadows that light forms, the relative intensity of all reflections interacting with each other and all the geometry basically that exists around and which if you revisit slowly you can construct a very nice geometric wave theory picture that reveals properties of light. You can do something similar with sounds and smells (diffusion). The entire world becomes a super dense information providing environment. We probably discard ~99.99% of that information as humans that the senses provide.

If you can record what happens to a fist full of small stones that you throw to the sky and release and they fall down in some fictitious sphere (but all are parabolas in reality) (like fireworks) you can in a single picture that is revisited as video with a timer mechanism recover a lot of kinematics. We need to solve this timer thing but if we used some internal loop style clock or a very faithful repetitive property we can get at least a 0.01 sec error system or much less. I interpret the OP that the machine or higher intelligence can have multiple instances of the human senses like the equivalent of 100 humans or more all cooperating in recording and sharing data effectively observing a scene from many angles/vantage (and time) points.


I agree with BTM in how imperfect eye and other organs can prove but as a photographic or video equivalent it does a decent job that the data processing can work with later. We simply do not have the data processing of all the info the eyes provide. But a higher system with much larger memory and processing depth would be able to revisit as movie all its past and decode many details like a crime scene equivalent, basically rendering a simple scene the equivalent of many simultaneous better controlled experiments.

Just by studying a video sequence of the observation of stars in the sky against a fixed trees background you can recover in a single night the rotation of earth around its axis. Consider how much you can learn that way through a lunar eclipse now by revisiting the "video" of the phenomenon. See what you can learn now by comparing the intensity of light from the sun vs the full moon, or during the eclipse segments even etc. Study all the data that is visually available to you during all moon phases later and the entire math game that is created connects a ton of variables and leads to a system of equations that you can solve and reveal a lot of detail.

People shouldn't be ridiculing the thread because it appears heavily restrictive initially. It is an exercise. Instead the proper response is to expand the possibilities and find value even in the extremes. Of course it is harder to agree with OP or some lighter version of it. But it is in trying to defend the hard originally seemingly hopeless idea that one can learn more things. It is very easy to reject it and a lot more creative to try to defend it. Even if wrong this is exactly how you find its minimal expansion that is now true. Science/technology are in fact very often in the business of making the impossible possible rather than the practice of rejecting things because they seem hard originally. It is against our human nature to discourage hard projects.

Threads should be flexible and evolving because the objective here is to learn from each other not to define country borders and go to war as politicians do. One can always study the original idea and any nearby tangents that emerge so that we do not waste time on divisive argumentation as much. For example if we developed very advanced AI but we are afraid it can run away and do whatever it likes we could release it in the form of a system that has sensors and amazing processing capabilities/effective intelligence greater than human but no arms or adaptable external geometry that would provide dexterity outside a minimum parameter space, in order to contain it and still learn from its ability to observe the universe much better than we do. Supply it with telescopes and other wider range spectrum sensors/detectors or access to other databases and see it find our physics faster than our experiments often. So yes that way we can learn from AI without being threatened from it and see how advanced it can get without risking losing the planet to it right away.

Therefore restricting its tool making capability and maybe its communications to other machines can contain it better but still enjoy the benefits of the other effective intelligence if we released it in some remote location and then observed it (or sent it to another planet/satellite). It is like we have created a very intelligent self learning observatory/detector. In time we may be also providing it some minimal dexterity to witness how fast it can use it to create tools and some 3d printing technology and processing of raw materials from its environment to witness how it can build its own "civilization" and better equipment to conduct some experiments also now. So to go to the full range of attributes for that intelligence we could start gradually from a more restricted position in order to not lose control right away and still understand to a degree how it advances. Imagine also how it builds its own math and then can use it to better analyze the data its sensors and limited experiments can provide. Observing how it uses its 3d printing capability to develop new but still not immediately very advanced tools and expand its abilities would be thrilling.

I've said nothing of the sort. I said that there would be a massive number of possible models that would be entirely internally consistent (logic and math) and consistent with what information its eyes would be capable of sending (extremely limited observations made gazillions of times are extremely limited*) to its hyper-intelligent brain.

*no additional useful information is obtained by looking at 100,000,000 blades of grass growing than from looking at a few growing. The same is true for family vacation pics in which the entirety of knowledge to be gained is "wow, your family is boring and you seem incapable of recognizing this."

Who said anything about this?

Yeah, there was never really any serious challenge to this. Maybe some proof by example and gross ignorance/stupidity (wave motion is a human invention!!) but nothing serious.

I think that there are two correlated but different types of high IQs. One involves the ability to quickly understand complex concepts that other people have thought of, and the other is the ability to come up with an original idea yourself. If your high IQ is more of the first type you would need a lot more clones to duplicate Einstein than if it was of the second type. If getting a Nobel Prize in physics was the only way to keep your children alive I would think that (a younger) Dean Kamen would be favored over 99% of physics Phd's.

Knowing that it won't be read or understood, I feel like leaving this here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm

What is your basis for this belief?

I mean, you can derive plenty of QM from merely looking at the world with human eyes and applying logic/model fitting to what you see. For example, ordinary matter requires the Pauli Exclusion Principle:

An intelligence would spot these kind of patterns and logical requirements that we simply miss. Like I said, all of classical and a good portion of quantum can be derived by simply looking at a wave with human eyes. The way light plays off a large quantity of rapidly moving dipoles gives you an incredible amount of information that our dog-brains are incapable of seeing the logical consequences of. I am sure there are many others that we haven't realized and probably can't. It'd be harder on a barren planet, but on Earth we're surrounded by vast numbers of incredibly complex quantum machines (life), that would be different if QM was even slightly different, that would be different if almost any part of subatomic physics was different (because of the types and ratios of matter we'd see on Earth and what they could create). We have many strands of evidence of the macro scale of the universe imprinted repeatedly over billions of years, much of which you can probably derive from say, the way a plant's leaves look (vs other possibilities). The very existence of complex life (which can be irradiated away) gives you evidence about the scale of the universe and the frequency of many different cosmic-scale events, which gives you an insight into many aspects of physics, if not substantially all. You can build an impressive model from what you see and maybe even more importantly, what you don't see. I do think life and its complexity is needed to logically exclude possibilities and get the large quantities of information needed about the history of the cosmos and Earth (which takes you to subatomic physics) - I don't think my OP would be possible on a barren planet for example.

I find your dismissal arrogant and boring and uncreative. And probably wrong - at lot more probably wrong than the odds you're giving it.

+1

Another proof by example....but even ignoring that, its simply not true. Pauli Exclusion is just one mathematically consistent way to explain bulk matter. There could be an infinite number of other consistent ways to explain it which humans never thought of because we can't do the math. Some of those maybe are actually correct and Pauli exclusion might just be an approximation or inconsistent for reasons we don't understand.....in which case 300 years from now your intellectual descendants will be calling us all ******s for ever taking the exclusion principle seriously.

Solid description of your posts.

You don't get there with classical though - which is the point that you're not getting. I'm not saying that bulk matter by itself gets us specifically to a proof of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, but it shows the world would look different if things were different, in ways that aren't obvious.

It's one data point of hundreds of thousands that excludes a large variety of possibilities. For example, it excludes a non-QM world.

The exclusion principle is a description of reality, so by definition it can't be ******ed even if it is very slightly off...the aether on the other hand was an invention, a substance/substrate posited to exist so as not to have to let go of some ridiculously rigid and simplistic ways of thinking.

That you use the word "proof" here shows how poorly you understand modeling and data fitting.

Not unless you posit that there's EXACTLY ONE mathematical model that gives results consistent with QM observations. And that would be a silly thing to posit.

Nah. We just think that false claims and nonsense ought to be called out as such.

Wouldn't the entity come to think about that the stars may be suns? He sees them blink, realizing they have to be point-like for that, compared to the planets. He has noticed how the heat near the ground makes the picture generated unstable, could the same phenomenom be behind the stars blinking? Some, the ones moving night after night don't blink. They must be apparently bigger, but their moving pattern suggest they move around the sun, so they may be smaller in reality. So the stars must be very intense compared to their size, maybe suns?

The galaxy thing he may have to guess, he sees the Pleiades, so stars can group. How big groups? Can some of the fuzzy spots on the night sky be very large groups very far away? Here may come a limit. Can just smartness tell if there are galaxies or not? I can't confirm.

I think it's probably instantly obvious (i.e. the first seconds or minutes), that:

1) matter is divisible and made up of very, very tiny components
2) there are small handful of stable fundamental forces that explain nearly everything
3) we're on a ball of matter suspended in a void, orbiting a powerful energy source

Once you have the sun, other suns follow with a 99.999% certainty, just from 1-3 above. Galaxies probably follow as well from slightly subtler observations/logic about the size of the universe.

How do you know classical theories can't reproduce bulk matter? Why can't somebody really really smart explain everything we see purely with classical mechanics and really really tough math no human is close to understanding?


You keep saying stuff like this....but I don't think you get at all why smart people took the ether idea seriously. Which makes your viewpoints very superficial and dumb.

Actually, the answer is probably yes, or at very least they would draw. As soon as you take people off the timer, you might as well throw ratings away, because the advantage chess grandmasters have is their ability to intuitively see the correct moves more quickly and accurately than their opponents. 10,000 good players, sufficiently organized and with plenty of time could out calculate Kasparov. It would be a lot like the brute force computer defeats he faced back in the nineties.

+2

It's can be as interesting to prove something wrong as right.