# Would a Superintelligence See Different Laws of Physics

- Original post: https://www.twitter.com/i/status/2121299366631608541
- Source account: [@sopharicks](https://x.com/sopharicks)
- Source language: English
- Duration: 1:28
- Published: 2026-11-13
- Canonical URL: https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics

## Transcript

[0:00](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics) What model of reality would an arbitrarily intelligent kind of, you know, like a planet or galaxy-sized intelligence, uh, construct?

[0:07](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=7) Would they construct the same laws of physics as us?

[0:09](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=9) Well, possibly not, because a huge amount of what we-- of, of the, the regularities that we perceive in physics are actually artifacts of some limited bandwidth of, uh, of sensory processing or some limited computational capacity that we have with our intelligence.

[0:23](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=23) And if you took the limit as our sensory processing became, uh, you know, infinitely high bandwidth and as our computational capability became infinitely good, you wouldn't have to construct those representations anymore.

[0:32](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=32) An evocative example is to take the case of fluid mechanics.

[0:34](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=34) When we look at water or something, uh, we see certain continuum fluid properties.

[0:40](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=40) We see, you know, densities, momentum, pressure, uh, you know, energy, temperature, those kinds of things.

[0:45](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=45) So, these kind of bulk continuum properties come about from the fact that we can't see individual molecules, and we don't have the computational capacity to track them all individually.

[0:55](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=55) But if you imagine now your galaxy-scale intelligence, and it goes and looks at what we see as a puddle of water, but it actually has, you know, the, the, the sensory resolution to see every particle and to track the, you know, the phase-based trajectory of every particle,

[1:07](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=67) it wouldn't know what we were talking about if we started talking about pressure and temperature.

[1:10](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=70) It wouldn't come up with the Navier-Stokes equations because it wouldn't need to.

[1:13](https://www.translate.mom/transcript/Ac3lLYWun11r/en/would-a-superintelligence-see-different-laws-of-physics?t=73) That's a regularity that simply wouldn't exist in its, in its representation of the world, uh, because it's a regularity that only makes sense at a certain kind of mesoscale level of s- of sensory, uh, observation and a certain mesoscale level of intelligence.