We are all aliens to each other, since we view the world from different perspectives

In particle physicist Daniel Whiteson’s book, Do Aliens Speak Physics?, he speaks about how if alien beings came to Earth and we tried to communicate with them, almost certainly this would be very difficult, given how differently they likely would perceive reality. And without common perceptions, understanding is hard to come by.

Assuming, as we progress along our Drake equation, that visiting aliens are mathematical, scientific, and communicative, the next hurdle to a full scientific mind meld is whether we are looking at the same Universe. If aliens have different senses, they will perceive different bits of the Universe — which will naturally lead them to ask different questions about it.

…What’s more, our senses don’t influence only what we see and what questions we ask about it; they guide the explanations we devise. Our familiar experience supplies us with tools for describing the unfamiliar. Science is an attempt to explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, the invisible in terms of the visible, like intellectual night-vision goggles. Without a shared vocabulary for experience of the world, will we find it difficult to share each other’s understanding of the Universe?

I’m about halfway through watching F1, the Apple movie about Formula One racing. The fastest cars on the planet are being driven around racetracks by people with an astounding degree of ability. Their reflexes and split-second decision making are far beyond the capabilities of ordinary humans. I can try to imagine what it is like to drive a Formula One race car at over 200 mph, but there’s no way I can experience what a Formula One driver does.

And we’re both human beings, with similar bodies and organs of perception — eyes, ears, touch, etc. Whiteson writes:

If we are going to understand alien science, we need to know more than just what they sense — the raw information — we need to know what it’s like to have those senses. If an alien can see in the infrared or can taste neutrinos, what is their mental picture of the world outside their head? How does that interpretative step affect the science they do?

This is a difficult problem, even for understanding other Earth creatures. What is it like to be a bat or a person who sincerely enjoys deep-dish pizza? Does a sea scallop, which possesses hundreds of eyes that respond to light but lacks the neural power to process that into an image, actually see? Spiders have two different kinds of eyes; do they see one image, or two? Does an octopus with a distributed nervous system and semi-independent limbs have nine mental pictures of its environment?

…When you sip a nice wine, you describe it in terms of the familiar flavors you detect. In the same way, physics seeks to understand the unknown, but the stories we tell about our new knowledge are expressed in terms of the known. Because we can build new eyeballs, but we can’t build new brains. So far.

My mystical experiences are pretty much limited to the psychedelic trips I took in college way back in the 1960s. Thanks to LSD and mescaline, I was able to perceive reality in a very different manner from everyday consciousness. At least, my everyday consciousness. I’m open to the possibility that other people have the ability to see the world in a fashion that is equally at odds from how I do, or how most people do.

Really, it’s impossible for anyone to know what is like to be us, because there’s only one person in the entire cosmos who knows what it is like to be me or you: me or you. Like the scientists in the quotation above, we try to use our understanding of how the world appears to us to grasp how the world appears to other people. But I have no way of knowing if my wife looks upon reality in a markedly different manner than I do.

So in a sense we are alien beings, inhabiting our own private planet with a population of one. Sometimes we find other people who appear to be so similar to us, we feel a marvelous intimacy with them. Perhaps this is one way to describe love: two alien beings who are able to bridge their differences and create a closely shared planetary life together.

Thankfully, we humans are highly social creatures. We find ways to communicate through language, music, art, gestures, poetry, science, athletics, and so many other ways. We struggle to understand and to be understood. Always imperfectly. Yet never in vain.