>>13023259>But they’d also think we’re geniuses for building shit like skyscrapers and computers and rockets with this completely arbitrary and autistic number system. It’s like a monkey inventing the iphone with the idea of dividing bananas by apples.Huh? I doubt it. They surely have at least one system of their own for understanding and manipulating reality. If they're smart enough to see us, they'd definitely be smart enough to quickly figure out the basics of how we constructed things.
Assuming they're beings that essentially exist like any other matter in our 4D spacetime as we understand it, then they're going to be well-aware of some fundamental math ideas as well, like geometry. Even if the way they think about it may be different, they'll understand we must have learned the same fundamental things underlying those concepts.
It'll get trickier if their sensory perception is very different. Like maybe they don't detect photons at all and instead somehow perceive and move by sensing the magnetic field or gravity or deploying a swarm of nanoscale entities which somehow convey some kind of representation. Or maybe they only have olfactory perception and touch, or something. But even if that's the case, they're still going to have some kind of analogue of geometry, even if they don't necessarily talk about it in a visual way.
I think people underestimate aliens, and also underestimate us if we ever run into aliens in the future. If any two intelligent species meet, then unless one is actively trying to evade or deceive the other, I think they won't be that perplexed about the other. Just fascinated, and maybe unable to meaningfully communicate for a long time.
