Remember those pictures from earlier? Well I confess, I pulled a little trick on the reader here. I know for a fact that it is impossible to derive general relativity from those two pictures, because neither of them are real. The apple is from this CGI video, the grass is from this blender project. In neither case are Newtonian gravity or general relativity included in the relevant codes.
And if you are in a simulation, Ockham’s razor becomes significantly stronger. If your simulation is on the scale of a falling apple, programming general relativity into it is a ridiculous waste of time and energy. The simulators will only input the simplest laws of physics necessary for their purposes.
I do agree that the AI would probably not deduce GR from these images, since I don’t think there will be anything like absorption spectra or diffraction patterns accidentally encoded into this image, as there might be in a real image.
I don’t think “That Alien Message” meant to say anything like “an alien superintelligence could deduce information that was not encoded in any form in the message it received”. I think it mainly just meant to say “an entity with a bunch more available compute than a human, the ability to use that compute efficiently could extract a lot more information out of a message if it spent a lot of time on analysis than a human glancing at that image would extract”.
I do agree that the AI would probably not deduce GR from these images, since I don’t think there will be anything like absorption spectra or diffraction patterns accidentally encoded into this image, as there might be in a real image.
Real images are taken by real cameras, and usually it takes a whole lot more than a commercial smartphone or even a good DSLR to capture those things. They’re not optimized for it, you won’t just notice any spectral lines or diffraction patterns over the noise (diffraction patterns I guess you could if you set up a specific situation for them. Not accidentally, though).
Response on reading the rest of the post: “lol”.
I do agree that the AI would probably not deduce GR from these images, since I don’t think there will be anything like absorption spectra or diffraction patterns accidentally encoded into this image, as there might be in a real image.
I don’t think “That Alien Message” meant to say anything like “an alien superintelligence could deduce information that was not encoded in any form in the message it received”. I think it mainly just meant to say “an entity with a bunch more available compute than a human, the ability to use that compute efficiently could extract a lot more information out of a message if it spent a lot of time on analysis than a human glancing at that image would extract”.
Real images are taken by real cameras, and usually it takes a whole lot more than a commercial smartphone or even a good DSLR to capture those things. They’re not optimized for it, you won’t just notice any spectral lines or diffraction patterns over the noise (diffraction patterns I guess you could if you set up a specific situation for them. Not accidentally, though).