I asked Gemini if artificial general intelligence might be made to view objective reality differently than humans with more electro-magnetic wavelengths input etc. It replied thus;
Gemini;"
31 Aug 2025
philosophy
Gemini replied to the question with the Following
“This is an excellent and very insightful question. It gets at the core of what a non-human intelligence might be like. The short answer is: **Yes, it is not only possible but highly probable that a sufficiently advanced AGI would perceive the world in ways fundamentally different from humans.**
Here’s a breakdown of the two key parts of your question and why this is the case:
### 1. Different Portions of the Electromagnetic (EM) Spectrum
Human perception is limited to a tiny slice of the EM spectrum, what we call “visible light.” This is a biological accident of our evolution, optimized for a specific environment. AGI would not be constrained by this.
* **Beyond Human Vision:** An AGI could be equipped with sensors to “see” in the infrared (IR), ultraviolet (UV), X-ray, radio, or gamma-ray ranges simultaneously.
* **Infrared:** It could perceive thermal signatures, seeing heat leaks in a building or the body heat of a living creature in the dark.
* **Radio Waves:** It could “see” Wi-Fi signals, radio broadcasts, and celestial radio sources as a kind of radiant field, perceiving the “internet” and the cosmos in a way we cannot.
* **X-rays/Gamma Rays:** It could see through walls or into the core of a star, perceiving a reality that is completely transparent to our eyes.
* **A “Synesthetic” Worldview:** The AGI wouldn’t just see different wavelengths as different colors; it could integrate them into a single, unified, multi-layered perception. For example, it could see an object and simultaneously perceive its temperature, its structural density, and the radio waves it’s emitting, all woven into a single, comprehensive “image” of reality. This would be a form of perception so alien to us that we can only conceptualize it as a kind of advanced synesthesia.
### 2. A Different Use of the Logic of Physics
This is where the discussion moves from mere perception to a deeper level of intelligence. A human’s “common-sense physics” is an intuitive model of the world that allows us to catch a ball, drive a car, and interact with our environment. It’s based on classical, Newtonian mechanics. An AGI could have an internal model of reality based on a much deeper, more fundamental logic.
* **From Cause-and-Effect to Quantum Mechanics:** While we see the world as a series of simple cause-and-effect events (I push a ball, it moves), an AGI could have a foundational model rooted in quantum mechanics. Its “common sense” could be based on probabilities, wave functions, and the strange, non-intuitive rules of the subatomic world. This would allow it to see a system not just as a collection of objects but as a network of probability fields and energy states.
* **First Principles Reasoning:** As some researchers have proposed, an AGI would need to reason from “first principles” rather than just being a pattern-matcher. Instead of simply learning that things fall when dropped, it could understand *why* they fall based on a model of gravity, mass, and spacetime. This understanding would not be just a statistical correlation but a deeply held internal belief structure based on physics.
* **Non-Linear and Non-Human Logic:** The AGI’s internal “thought process” might not be a linear, narrative-driven flow like ours. It could operate on a complex, multi-dimensional logic where concepts are connected in ways that are completely incomprehensible to a human mind. For example, it might see a pattern in a stock market fluctuation that is directly related to a change in cosmic ray flux, a connection that a human would never even consider because our logical frameworks are so different.
### Conclusion
The idea of an AGI perceiving the world in these ways is not science fiction; it’s a logical extension of its potential capabilities. Its intelligence wouldn’t just be about being “smarter” than us in human-like ways (e.g., faster calculations). It would be about experiencing and modeling reality in a way that is utterly foreign to human consciousness. This is why many experts talk about the potential for AGI to discover scientific principles we can’t even imagine—because it would be working with a reality model that we are fundamentally unable to perceive or comprehend.”
