>>14155589we don't even understand non human intelligence on earth and there's plenty to choose from.
what makes us think we understand it if it's from an equally intelligent alien?
as for the why, the ability to predict the future is a massive survival advantage. in combination with our absolute dependence on each other, this turned into co-evolution of empathy, reading other people's feelings and intentions, anticipating their motives. it turned our brains into sophisticated human mind readers, so a lot of what we see and what we create is infused and projected with our human emotions. in our stories animals and inanimate objects have human feelings and talk our languages. they go on very human adventures. why wouldn't we impose our nature onto aliens too?
and since our brains grew from the inside out from fish over reptiles to mammals, we share many of these qualities in varying degrees with our genetic relatives inside the vertebrate group, and also they share them with us, including the dominance hierarchies most of our societies of ancient times and today build on or at least lend some characteristics from. that arrangement in ranks made us think there are beings below us, animals, and logically, beings above us, gods. our qualities were seen as above the animals since we didn't know what they were truly capable of. it was always self centered.
