Ask A Genius 1450: Explore AI, Consciousness, and the Limits of Human Perception
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/13
Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen explore the isomorphism between mind and reality, questioning whether evolution limits our grasp of fundamental physics. They discuss sensory blind spots, extended cognition through AI, and whether consciousness must evolve or be engineered to comprehend domains like dark matter or a Theory of Everything.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Your realization at 21—that the physics we perceive tells us something about the physics of our minds—does that suggest an isomorphism between the structure of perception and the structure of external reality?
Rick Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: There is a deeper set of analogies, at the very least. There is an old joke about yoga. The original meaning of yoga is “union.” People think you need years of training to experience union with everything. However, the punchline is: you are already experiencing union with everything, all the time. Otherwise, you wouldn’t perceive anything at all.
So this internal-external isomorphism—between perception and object, between consciousness and nature—raises the question: are there things we’re categorically leaving out of physics simply because we didn’t evolve in a context where they were relevant?
In other words, the isomorphism between internal experience and external structure is shaped—and limited—by evolution. By the constraints of space, time, and what I’d call the “medium world.”
Rosner: Yes. There are many examples where the answer is clearly yes.
Take wavelengths of light. We perceive only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some wavelengths we see. Others we perceive as heat. Some—like X-rays—we only notice after they’ve caused biological damage.
But most of the spectrum—radio waves, for example—we don’t perceive at all.
Different animals sense different parts of the spectrum, right? So right there, we’re not just missing information—we’remissing entire modes of reality. Aspects of physics that are happening constantly, all around us, and we have no direct perception of them.
We’re blind to most of it. And there’s no intuitive way to feel it, like we do with visible light.
Jacobsen: That’s much better. Thank you.
Rosner: So there’s that. Now, are you asking whether there are entire forces we’re missing? So, we perceive vibrations in the air through hearing. But we don’t perceive the Earth’s magnetic field. Birds do, because they use it for navigation.
So yes, there are physical phenomena we didn’t evolve to sense. But you’re asking a larger question: are there fundamental forces in the universe that we haven’t discovered because (a) they’re irrelevant to human survival, and (b) evolution never had a reason—or a mechanism-to—build sensors for them?
In other words, we don’t need to perceive them, and evolution had no path to make us aware of them.
I don’t think so. We’ve identified the fundamental forces in physics. All of them—except gravity—have been unified under electroweak theory. That includes electricity, magnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.
Now, I’m not exactly sure what keeps quarks bound together, but I assume that’s part of the strong force. Regardless, we have a working theory that accounts for all known forces.
So, your question: could there be a fifth fundamental force that we’ve missed entirely because it doesn’t intersect with human biology or sensory systems? That? I think probably not.
Jacobsen: I’m asking something slightly different—something more architectural. Is the structure of the human mind expandable to other perceptual domains?
In other words, even if we had the sensory input and computational capacity, is our cognitive architecture in principle capable of incorporating radically new types of information—say, from a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or a Theory of Everything (TOE)—and reasoning about their implications?
If so, then the mind, as structured, could adapt to incorporate higher-order derivative principles of physics—principles our ancestors never needed.
Rosner: Ah, okay—I see where you’re going. That’s where big data analytics and AI come in. Humans evolved as generalists. We’re good at spotting patterns in the environment that we can exploit. Most other animals are not nearly as good at that.
Some monkeys have figured out that moving into cities gives them better chances to steal food or shiny objects from humans. That’s clever. In Moscow, some dogs have learned how to use the subway. They commute. They sleep in one part of the city and ride the subway to another area where food is easier to find. People in Moscow love their subway dogs.
But overall, humans are far better at abstract pattern recognition than dogs or monkeys. And AI is going to be far better than us. Right now, most of our perception is still local—it comes through eyes, ears, touch, and so on. We do have extended perception—satellites, telescopes, television—but our integration of that information is still basic and siloed.
To truly integrate extended perception, we’ll need AI. With it, we could become what you might call “larger beings”—organisms that perceive and act across thousands of miles. That would be a kind of perception we don’t yet have.
And yes, there are aspects of physics we cannot perceive. We can only infer their existence due to our spatial and temporal limitations.
Take dark matter.
We’ve observed that galaxies appear to be surrounded by halos of unseen mass. That’s based on velocity maps of stars orbiting the galactic center.
According to Newtonian mechanics, the farther out a star is, the slower it should move. But stars at the outskirts are moving too fast. That implies there’s invisible mass—dark matter—holding them gravitationally.
Our bodies alone would never have discovered that. It’s a phenomenon beyond our senses, and it shows just how limited our evolved perception truly is.
Jacobsen: Thank you. That is precisely the direction I was aiming toward.
Rosner: With observation, theory, and the arrival of big data, we’ll be able to incorporate much more into our understanding. So yes.
That said, this idea is a common trope in science fiction. I remember a story set during World War II: a pilot is flying back from battle in a shot-up plane. He’s wounded, and the plane is barely holding together. Throughout the story, we discover the plane shouldn’t be flying at all.
But because the pilot was shot in a specific part of his brain—damaging a region that usually blocks access to some higher force—he unknowingly keeps the plane in the air with his mind.
It has a happy ending. He makes it back to base and lands the plane just before recovering enough of his mental faculties to lose the ability. The idea is that his “mental power” vanishes once his brain returns to its normal limits.
That theme shows up a lot—someone is altered or learns magic and suddenly gains access to hidden forces in the world.
However, I don’t believe that’s the case in reality.
In artificial general intelligence (AGI), many models are still based on the human brain. If the brain alone were enough, without technological augmentation, to access a radically wider computational range or a new set of conceptual categories, we’d see more evidence of that.
Could we be making faulty assumptions by using the human brain as a model for general intelligence? That’s a valid question.
But I’d say no. Evolution is opportunistic, not teleological. There’s no intent or goal. It’s like water: water doesn’t want toget everything wet, but it behaves in such a way that, if there’s a leak, it flows downhill and spreads until everything is soaked.
Evolution behaves the same way. If a genetic change arises that doesn’t kill the organism—and even better, if it helps—it persists. Over millions of years of primate evolution, and hundreds of millions of years of brain evolution more broadly, that process has refined how organisms perceive and understand the world.
So, has evolution missed major tricks in how to think or perceive? I don’t think so. There are natural limitations, of course—we’re local in space and time, so we’re not excellent at grasping phenomena across hundreds of light-years. Our ability to perceive across those distances is recent and mediated by tools.
Yes, we’re missing some aspects of reality. But in terms of conceptual structures and strategies for understanding the world, we’ve hit all the low-hanging fruit.
AI will cover those areas, and it’ll also reach insights that are not easy to access, primarily through big data analytics.
Is that reasonable?
Jacobsen: Yes.
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