I think that our laws of physics are in part a product of our perception, but I need to clarify what I mean by that. I doubt space or time are fundamental pieces in whatever machine code runs our universe, but that doesn’t mean that you can take perception-altering drugs and travel through time. I think that somehow the fact that human intelligence was built on the evolutionary platform of DNA means that any physics we come up with has to build up to atoms which have the chemical properties that make DNA work. Physics doesn’t have to describe everything, it just needs to describe the things relevant to DNA, which is in fact a lot! DNA can code the construction things which react to electromagnetic fields correlated with all sorts of physical processes.
This leads me to the question of what would it look like to see an alien that runs on different physics on the same universe platform through our physics. As an example which I haven’t thought through rigorously, you can formulate non-relativistic quantum mechanics with momentum and position operators, but you move back and forth between them with Fourier transforms which only differ by a sign flip. You could make a self-consistent physics by just exchanging all of the momentum and position operators with each other. Maybe you could end up with localized atoms which are near each other and interacting in momentum space but diffuse nonsense in our native position space. If you build life in that universe, maybe it doesn’t have localized structure in ours, and maybe it just acts like diffuse energy or something to us.
I think that our laws of physics are in part a product of our perception, but I need to clarify what I mean by that. I doubt space or time are fundamental pieces in whatever machine code runs our universe, but that doesn’t mean that you can take perception-altering drugs and travel through time. I think that somehow the fact that human intelligence was built on the evolutionary platform of DNA means that any physics we come up with has to build up to atoms which have the chemical properties that make DNA work. Physics doesn’t have to describe everything, it just needs to describe the things relevant to DNA, which is in fact a lot! DNA can code the construction things which react to electromagnetic fields correlated with all sorts of physical processes.
This leads me to the question of what would it look like to see an alien that runs on different physics on the same universe platform through our physics. As an example which I haven’t thought through rigorously, you can formulate non-relativistic quantum mechanics with momentum and position operators, but you move back and forth between them with Fourier transforms which only differ by a sign flip. You could make a self-consistent physics by just exchanging all of the momentum and position operators with each other. Maybe you could end up with localized atoms which are near each other and interacting in momentum space but diffuse nonsense in our native position space. If you build life in that universe, maybe it doesn’t have localized structure in ours, and maybe it just acts like diffuse energy or something to us.