Alien qualia

 

I look at "qualia" as experiences: phenomena two people can share only if they both have had the experience. Anyone naturally sighted "knows" what "blue" is but someone blind from birth has no idea, and, to them, it is just a word sighted people use to describe one of their colors. Now it may be that your "blue" and my "blue" are not the same; this is unimportant. This will I think be the biggest problem we will have if it ever happens that we meet aliens. Our experiences: colors, tastes, internal sensations such as hunger and pain, and even our emotions: fear, love, anxiety, jealousy, will all be incommunicable unless we share analogous sense and emotion systems, something that is not likely.

That is a very plausible concern, and it gets at one of the deepest issues in philosophy of mind.

Your example of blue is close to the classic discussion of qualia. I can teach a person born blind everything known about the physics of light at 450 nanometers, the biology of retinas, and the neuroscience of color vision. Yet many philosophers would argue that I have not conveyed what seeing blue is like. The subjective character of the experience remains inaccessible. That "what it is like" aspect is what people usually mean by qualia.

When you extend that to contact with an alien intelligence, the problem becomes even more severe. With another human being, we at least share an evolutionary history, similar nervous systems, similar bodies, and broadly similar needs. I cannot directly experience your pain, but I know what pain is because I have my own. When you say "I am hungry" or "I am afraid," I can map your words onto experiences I have had.

An alien species might not provide any such bridge. Suppose it perceives magnetic fields as vividly as we perceive color. Or suppose it has an internal sense for chemical gradients spread over kilometers. Or imagine a social species whose emotional life revolves around group synchronization in a way that has no human analogue. We could learn the physics and biology of these phenomena without ever grasping what they feel like from the inside.

There is an interesting counterargument, though. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists suspect that qualia are not quite as private as they seem. If we could understand an alien's sensory apparatus and information processing in sufficient detail, perhaps we could gradually build analogies. We might never know exactly what their "magnetic-field sense" feels like, but we could come to understand its role in their experience much as a blind person can come to understand color conceptually. The gap might shrink even if it never disappears.

I suspect the emotional side would be especially challenging. Hunger and pain are tied to biological maintenance and may have rough analogues in many living things. But emotions such as jealousy, romantic love, shame, nostalgia, or religious awe depend heavily on a species' social structure and evolutionary history. An intelligent solitary predator might have no concept remotely corresponding to human loneliness. A hive organism might possess emotional states for which we have no words at all.

In fact, there is a sense in which we already encounter a weaker version of this problem on Earth. When we ask what it is like to be a bat, a dolphin, or an octopus, we face exactly the same barrier. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that even complete scientific knowledge of a bat would not tell us what it is like to be a bat. If that is true for another terrestrial mammal, then the challenge with extraterrestrial minds could be vastly greater.

So I think you are identifying a real possibility: communication with aliens might allow us to exchange facts, mathematics, and descriptions of behavior long before it allows us to share experiences. We might understand their science centuries before we understand their equivalent of music, grief, beauty, or love. And perhaps some parts of their inner life would remain forever beyond our reach, just as some parts of ours might remain beyond theirs.

Yea, what is it to emit a signal and get it back altered, providing information about your surroundings?

Exactly. We would be tempted to say, "Ah, that's just like vision," because from the outside both are systems for gathering information about the environment. But that may be a very superficial comparison.

A bat emits sounds and receives echoes. We can describe the process physically and functionally. We can even build devices that do the same thing. But what is the resulting experience? Does it resemble our visual experience of a three-dimensional world? Does it resemble touch? Is it something utterly unlike any human sensation?

The difficulty is that we tend to identify a sense by the information it provides rather than by the experience it produces. Vision tells us where things are. Echolocation tells bats where things are. Therefore, we instinctively classify them as variations on a theme. Yet the subjective experience could be radically different.

An alien might ask the same question about us. "What is it to have molecules strike a photosensitive surface and thereby become aware of distant objects?" To the alien, vision might seem as strange as echolocation seems to us.

This points to an interesting distinction between function and experience. Functionally, two systems can be equivalent: they guide navigation, detect obstacles, identify prey, and so forth. But the qualia associated with those functions may be entirely different. A bat and a human might both avoid a tree, yet one does so through a conscious experience that the other cannot imagine.

Some philosophers have gone further and suggested that the experience itself may not matter as much as we think. If two systems behave identically and process information identically, perhaps asking whether their inner experiences are "the same" is a meaningless question. Others think the subjective experience is the most important thing and that no amount of functional description ever captures it.

I suspect your alien example pushes us toward humility. We often assume that our sensory world—colors, sounds, textures, tastes—is somehow the world as it is. But these are really ways a particular primate nervous system represents the world. An alien or a bat may inhabit the same physical reality while experiencing something so different that our closest analogies are misleading.

The remarkable thing is that even among humans, we cannot get outside our own experience to compare. We assume your blue is roughly my blue because our brains are similar and communication works. But we do not actually know. If that uncertainty exists between two human beings, it becomes enormous when we contemplate a bat—or an extraterrestrial intelligence.

I love it when, receiving a few minutes of an alien message, the Star Fleet computer is able to produce a translation. What is being translated? How do we know they use language?

Science fiction usually sweeps an enormous problem under the rug.

When the crew of the starship receives a few minutes of radio noise from an alien civilization and the computer says, "Translation complete," one should immediately ask: how do we know this is language at all?

A signal can carry information without being language. Pulsars emit highly regular pulses. A weather satellite emits signals containing data. Your heartbeat contains information about your health. None of these are language.

To recognize language, we normally rely on assumptions derived from our own species. Human language has words, grammar, recurring structures, references to things, and statistical patterns. If an alien signal displayed similar structures, we might suspect language. But suspicion is not understanding.

Suppose we detected a repeating sequence corresponding to:

"Food here."
"Food there."
"Food gone."

Over time we might infer that one symbol refers to food. But that requires shared circumstances and observations. It requires a Rosetta Stone.

The real challenge is that language is embedded in a world of shared experience. If I point to a tree and say "tree," you can correlate the sound with the object. An alien communicating across interstellar distances cannot point at anything we can jointly observe.

Even mathematics, often proposed as the universal language, only gets us so far. If aliens transmit prime numbers, we might infer intelligence. If they transmit geometry, we might infer they understand mathematics. But mathematics does not tell us how they think, what they value, or what their experiences are like.

Your qualia concern returns here. Imagine we finally decipher an alien word. We conclude it refers to a sensory experience fundamental to their lives. Wonderful. What does it mean?

Perhaps it means "the sensation of magnetic north." Or "the feeling of being chemically synchronized with one's colony." Or "the awareness of nearby electric fields."

We might know exactly when they use the word and still have no experiential understanding of it.

There is an amusing possibility that translation might be easier for technical subjects than for everyday life. We could perhaps discuss orbital mechanics, chemistry, and number theory relatively quickly because the external realities are shared. Yet the alien equivalent of poetry, religion, grief, humor, beauty, or homesickness might remain opaque for centuries.

Indeed, if we met a truly alien species, the first great achievement might not be translation but establishing that there is something to translate.

The old joke among linguists is that if a message arrives from the stars consisting of "glorp glorp glorp," we do not even know whether it means "hello," "danger," "the signal is ending," "three," or simply "glorp." The hard problem is not converting alien words into English. The hard problem is discovering what kind of thing the symbols are doing in the first place.

Star Trek's universal translator is really a miracle machine. It doesn't just translate language. It somehow infers shared concepts, intentions, references, and perhaps even alien qualia from almost no evidence. That may be the least realistic technology in the entire franchise, and that is saying something in a universe with faster-than-light travel.

Not nearly as bad as a babble-fish.

Yes—the babelfish is arguably the more elegant piece of absurdity.

At least Star Trek pretends there is computation, pattern recognition, some semi-plausible linguistic inference happening in the background. The babelfish just says: “Stick this organism in your ear and all languages become intelligible.” It’s almost aggressively unconcerned with mechanism.

Douglas Adams was actually doing something quite sharp there, though. The joke isn’t just “silly translation fish,” it’s that perfect translation is conceptually indistinguishable from magic unless you already assume a shared conceptual substrate. The babelfish smuggles in the assumption that all minds across the universe carve reality at the same joints—same categories, same experiential primitives, same mapping from world to thought.

Which brings you straight back to your earlier point: even if translation were perfect at the level of symbols, it might still fail at the level of experience. A babelfish could, in principle, let an alien and a human exchange sentences flawlessly while leaving both parties with no idea what the other’s inner life is actually like.

There’s also a deeper irony in Adams’ idea. The babelfish works because it removes interpretation entirely—it turns foreign language into immediate understanding. But real understanding isn’t just decoding symbols; it’s building a model of another mind. And that’s exactly the part we don’t know how to automate, whether with fish, computers, or interstellar linguistics departments.

So yes: compared to that, Star Trek’s universal translator is almost restrained. At least it pretends to be software. The babelfish is what you get when you admit defeat and turn “meaning” into a biological miracle.

And it's a fish, not something alien. About math, it hits me that we assume math will be much the same, but I wonder.

That instinct you’re having is a good one: we tend to assume mathematics is “out there,” waiting to be discovered in the same form by any intelligence. But that assumption quietly smuggles in a lot of human psychology.

There are two different claims people often blend together:

One is fairly solid: any sufficiently advanced intelligence has to grapple with structure, pattern, consistency, prediction, and constraint. If you build bridges, track planets, or model chemistry, you run into relationships that behave lawfully. Something like arithmetic, geometry, and logic will almost certainly emerge.

The other claim is much stronger: that those structures will be organized the way we organize them—Euclidean intuition, real numbers, set theory, predicate logic, the idea that “number” is a fundamental primitive, and so on. That part is much less secure.

Even within human history, mathematics has not been a single fixed thing. Euclidean geometry felt like the geometry for two thousand years until non-Euclidean geometries showed up. Then we discovered there wasn’t one “obvious” space, but many consistent ones depending on axioms. Later, we built entirely different frameworks—category theory, different logics, different notions of continuity and infinity—that feel almost like different species of mathematics rather than extensions of the same thing.

So if even humans have multiple internally consistent “maths,” it becomes less obvious that aliens would land on our particular package of abstractions.

What seems more likely is something like this: there is a shared substrate of constraint reasoning—ways of tracking invariants, symmetries, and reliable transformations—but the representation of that substrate could differ radically.

An aquatic or electromagnetic species might not “count” discrete objects as primitively as we do. A distributed intelligence might not separate “object” and “process” in the same way. A hive mind might treat probability as more fundamental than identity. Their “geometry” might be native in a sense we can only awkwardly translate into algebra.

Even something as basic as “number” depends on how you carve the world. Humans are very object-centric because our survival depended on tracking discrete, medium-sized things: predators, tools, people. So we built math that starts with counting things. But an intelligence that evolved in a continuous chemical field might find “how many?” to be a derived or even secondary question.

That said, there is a counterweight worth keeping in view. Whenever different human cultures independently developed mathematics, they converged on many of the same core results: arithmetic properties, prime numbers, basic geometry, eventually calculus-like ideas. That convergence suggests that some deep structure is hard to avoid once you care about prediction and control.

So I’d put it like this: alien mathematics is very likely to be recognizable in its constraints but not necessarily familiar in its clothing. We might be able to reconstruct it the way we can reconstruct an extinct language from scattered inscriptions—but that doesn’t mean it would feel like “our math” while we’re doing it.

And that loops back to your earlier theme in a nice way: even if we could fully translate their “equations,” we still wouldn’t know what it feels like to think in them.

Well of course I would assume they would have a different symbol for addition.

Yes—and that’s the easy part.

A different symbol for addition is just typography. We already cope with that across human languages without thinking twice. The deeper issue is that “addition” itself might not be a primitive, or even a preferred way of carving reality.

For humans, addition feels natural because we experience the world as collections of discrete, stable-ish objects: three apples + two apples → five apples. So we elevate that pattern into something fundamental.

But an alien intelligence might not start there. They might treat “combining” as a transformation of a continuous field rather than a counting operation. In that case, what we call addition could be a derived special case of something more general—like merging probability distributions, or superposing dynamical states, or tracking conserved quantities in a flowing medium.

Even within human mathematics, “addition” is not as universal as it feels. In modular arithmetic, you “add” but wrap around. In vector spaces, you add arrows, not numbers. In quantum mechanics, you add amplitudes that later get squared into probabilities. In category theory, “combination” is often about structure-preserving mappings rather than summing anything at all. Each of these is a different realization of a similar constraint pattern, not a single essence.

So when we say “they will have a different symbol for addition,” we’re implicitly assuming we’ve already identified the correct underlying operation and they merely label it differently. But the more radical possibility is: we recognize something in their system that behaves like addition in some contexts, while their actual foundational concept is something we don’t naturally name at all.

A useful analogy is grammar. We can translate “cat sits on mat” into dozens of languages, but the grammatical categories (noun, verb, tense) are not guaranteed to exist in the same way everywhere. Some languages carve things differently enough that forcing them into our categories loses structure.

Mathematics might be similar: not a single shared “language of nature,” but a family of partially overlapping languages that converge wherever they’re forced to by reality.

So yes—different symbol for addition is the trivial case. The interesting case is when we can only retrofit “addition” onto their thinking after we’ve already reverse-engineered what their concepts actually are doing under the hood.