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> If we encountered an alien species with as much intellectual distance from us as we are to the monkeys, then how would our most innovative theories fare against theirs?

That depends on how far you are willing to suspend disbelief in your concept of what such an alien might look like.

Are they made of atoms? If so, then they are overwhelmingly like to have senses very similar to ours. This is because our senses are fundamentally rooted in the physics of atoms, and there just aren't that many fundamentally different things that atoms can do. They can absorb and emit photons, they can stick together and be pried apart, they can emit alpha and beta particles, and they can fuse and fission. That's about it. And with those fundamental building blocks there is only so much you can do. You can imagine, say, aliens that can natively detect different parts of the E-M spectrum than we do, but that's not going to lead them to new physics that we haven't discovered.

On the other hand, if these aliens are made of dark matter then all bets are off. But given how hard it is for us to detect dark matter at all it's hard to imagine how we would get to the point where we would even recognize a life form made of it, let alone figure out how to communicate with it.

> our senses are fundamentally rooted in the physics of atoms, and there just aren't that many fundamentally different things that atoms can do. They can absorb and emit photons, they can stick together and be pried apart, they can emit alpha and beta particles, and they can fuse and fission. That's about it. And with those fundamental building blocks there is only so much you can do.

Our traditional physical senses:

- Sight. Based on interacting with photons.

- Sound. This is based on atoms physically colliding with each other. However, we process it using a complex apparatus that essentially performs a Fourier transform on the raw air-pressure data, extracting the frequencies of the wave pattern that reaches our ears on the assumption that a wave pattern is what we will get.

- Touch. This is based on atoms colliding with each other. It is set up more for the detection of large-scale structural characteristics. (e.g. hard / soft / liquid)

- Smell. This is based on atoms colliding with each other. It is totally unlike touch in that the sense of smell processes molecules based on their molecular shape -- the specific way in which they interact with dedicated sensors -- rather than on their physical characteristics. At this level, you're interacting with a molecule more than with a substance.

- Taste. From a physics perspective, this is basically just the same thing as smell. From a biology perspective, it's pretty different.

I don't see this as good evidence that the set of possible senses is meaningfully limited by a simplistic view of how atoms can physically interact with other atoms.

We have many other senses that are less obviously based in simple physical interactions, like the sense of time.

Some people have had magnets implanted, leveraging their existing sense of touch into a sense of magnetic fields. This is something humans don't ordinarily have, and is actually not allowed for by your list of the capabilities of atoms -- you forgot that atoms can hold an electric charge -- but is analogous to some other animals' ability to sense electric fields.

I'm curious how you think "emitting an alpha particle" differs from "being pried apart" or "fissioning".

> many other senses

Yeah? Like what? You've listed two. Two is not "many".

You don't need to have a magnet implanted to feel a magnetic field. All you have to do is hold two magnets close to each other.

As for our "sense" of time, this arises from the fact that our brains perform data processing at a characteristic speed, and that in turn is an emergent property of atoms.

> I'm curious how you think "emitting an alpha particle" differs from "being pried apart" or "fissioning".

Alpha-decay is spontaneous, fissioning generally needs to initiated by neutron bombardment. "Being pried apart" was intended to refer to chemical reactions, not nuclear ones.

Since we're talking about hypotheticals:

Imagine a lifeform that experiences entanglement directly.

Or one that senses gravity waves. (It would have to be very, very, very big. But even so.)

Or one that is just as good at making maps of social and political configurations as it is at mapping its physical surroundings.

Or one that has evolved with an intuitive understanding of the patterns that define how knowledge is structured, rather than learning low-cost approximations for essentials and off-loading high-cost speculation to external media and low-threat contexts, like humans do.

"There are only so many ways for atoms to do stuff" is true, but that doesn't mean we have the first clue what all of those ways are.

> that doesn't mean we have the first clue what all of those ways are

Actually we know a few constraints that they have to meet:

1. They have to provide an evolutionary advantage in some environment

2. They have to be Turing-computable

3. They have to realizable in hardware made of atoms (unless you want to consider dark-matter aliens)

So:

> a lifeform that experiences entanglement directly

I don't know what you meant by this. You do experience entanglement directly. The entire classical world is made of entanglements. Your very existence is a massive network of entanglements.

> one that senses gravity waves

> It would have to be very, very, very big

This is actually conceivable for a dark-matter alien, but then we have all the aforementioned problems of detecting and communicating with it. For an alien made of ordinary matter this is inconceivable because #1 above.

> just as good at making maps of social and political configurations as it is at mapping its physical surroundings.

Humans are actually pretty good at this in their ancestral environment where there are at most 100-200 individuals to deal with.

But this is actually the most likely avenue IMO, an alien that can "natively" handle communities of millions or billions of individuals where everyone knows everyone else.

> Yeah? Like what?

Most people try to support an argument with something stronger than "I don't know very much".

You can sense acceleration.

You can sense temperature.

You can sense the position of the various parts of your own body. ("proprioception")

You can sense whether you need to eat, and what you should eat. ("hunger")

Note that from a physical perspective, hunger appears identical to taste and smell. That is to say, it is implemented by special receptors that bind to a particular molecular shape. But unlike those two, it is not general-purpose -- it is a computational artifact, the specialized means by which your digestive system sends messages to your nervous system. But it is no less of a sense than your others. A sense is a means of receiving input. This should tell you that the number of senses you may experience is not limited by the number of interactions one atom may have with another atom; it is at least as large as the number of different types of computation you might want to do.

If you're really interested in a catalog of senses, I suggest checking out the psychology literature. And whether you're interested or not, I suggest trying to base your arguments on something more than bluster.

Believing that humans have five senses has all the scientific backing of believing in the tongue map.

I think 'lisper wasn't interested in a catalog of senses, but whether they're "going to lead them to new physics that we haven't discovered". Once you listed are less about physics/external world and more about internal status of the body.

I don't think asserting that there's nothing more for us to discover is a good method of determining whether we might discover something new.

If an alien sense relying on physics unknown to us were to come to our attention, it seems likely to me that it would indeed lead us to discover that new physics. But since we don't know whether physics like that exists or not, we can't say whether such a sense could exist either. lisper has very clearly claimed that such a sense cannot exist because there is no such physics; I don't see how he could be interested in the question you state.

> Ones you listed are less about physics/external world and more about internal status of the body.

I'd say temperature, time, touch, hearing, sight, and smell are primarily about the external world and proprioception, taste, and hunger are primarily about the internal status of the body. That's really what distinguishes taste from smell. Acceleration seems like a gray area.

> If an alien sense relying on physics unknown to us were to come to our attention, it seems likely to me that it would indeed lead us to discover that new physics. But since we don't know whether physics like that exists or not, we can't say whether such a sense could exist either.

But we do know enough physics already to explain everything we can observe that surrounds us, not with our senses alone but with the measurement devices that we can construct.

The only physics that we can't measure and completely explain is that one that is anyway inadequately reachable not only to us with out human senses but to our measurement devices which already can measure changes in length 1000 times the size of the proton, which happen on the 4 km length (see LIGO).

The only physics that remains to be known better are the effects that happen on the galactic and intergalactic scales or inside of the black holes and during the first picoseconds of the existence of the universe, or with the particles that exist too short or interact too little to influence anything we can observe:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws...

"The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood"

"there’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century."

"You might question the “once and for all” part of that formulation, but it’s solid. Of course revolutions can always happen, but there’s every reason to believe that our current understanding is complete within the everyday realm. Using the framework of quantum field theory — which we have no reason to doubt in this regime — we can classify the kinds of new particles and forces that could conceivably exist, and go look for them. It’s absolutely possible that such particles and forces do exist, but they must be hidden from us somehow: either the particles are too massive to be produced, or decay too quickly to be detected, or interact too weakly to influence ordinary matter; and the forces are either too weak or too short-range to be noticed. In any of those cases, if they can’t be found by our current techniques, they are also unable to influence what we see in our everyday lives."

There’s a ton of things we have no explanation for — superconductors, how protons collide, a ton of things about material science, we’re still not great at non-local effects, etc. That’s setting aside the doozy of “gravity and particle physics say wildly incompatible things, and we’re not sure how to fix that”.

And when I say “how protons collide”, I mean numbers from existing accelerators don’t match predictions and they’re having to change models — and all the fixes they can come up with (eg, elaborate swarms of virtual quarks) still don’t fix the collision numbers.

There’s still a pretty poor understanding of 4D topology, and the effects and possible knotting states play in non-local interactions. Microsoft for instance theorizes that you can have 4D anyons, but no one is sure how to build them. And it comes into play in more mundane ways when talking about plasma physics or fluid dynamics, since the same mathematics governs stability there.

You seem to be wildly overstating the success of science.

And then I'd claim you wildly understating the success, of course. Superconductivity is not an effect that involves any "new physics" in the sense of the necessity of changing the underlying theories: it's the typical "emergent" property, and we know that modeling many of the "emergent" properties is far away from our possibilities. Ditto with the material science, or any other observations where "too many of the stuff known to us interacts at the same time." It's not "we don't know" in the sense that the basics will have to change it's "we don't know because there's too much to model at once" like we can't reliably predict the weather 2 weeks in advance, even if we understand the nature of the particles that produce the weather.

Edit: to answer your response below this post:

It's a [Citation needed] for you that the fundamentally "new physics" is needed instead of reaching the limits of our instruments or the modeling capability.

The second you mention is not something that contradicts what we measure, it just that naively trying to combine the provably successful models that match our measurements to produce "something more" outside of their domain really doesn't work: and that of course doesn't have to work to claim that the models do work for the things that they actually model, and which independently correspond to the things we can "observe" (where "observe" includes using our best measuring devices).

I disagree: I don’t think we know what features of the underlying model lead to the emergence of things like superconductivity, and having to account for that explicitly will demonstrate a new paradigm for analyzing the base mechanics — which is likely to lead to a new interpretation and “new physics”.

I’ll also note you didn’t reply to two big ones:

They can’t predict proton on proton collisions in a hyper controlled tube accurately.

They can’t predict how the two most established theories, each boasting dozens of orders of magnitude of accuracy, interact.

> Some people have had magnets implanted, leveraging their existing sense of touch into a sense of magnetic fields.

Touch is an EM forces interaction, not very different from magnets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

Apes use very similar senses, but our brain gives us the advantage of deriving more from those same senses. Similarly, aliens might be able to process the data better, or gather and process more data than we can.

In a sense, we are alien compared to our ancestors of hundreds of years ago. Our technology extended our natural sensors and we started to learn more about our place in the solar system, galaxy, super cluster and so on. We learned more about physics too. I suspect there is more to the story and more advanced aliens would have some surprising things to say about the nature of our universe. We might have difficulty understanding it if there is a large knowledge gap though.

We really have only one significant evolutionary advantage over apes and that is our ability to reason symbolically, i.e. to use language and math. We got that hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that, plus the invention of writing, turned us into Turing machines. That's as far as you can go in this universe unless you can somehow evolve a quantum computer, but that seems exceedingly unlikely. It's hard to imagine an environment where there would be an evolutionary advantage to being able to factor large primes.

Aliens might have made significant scientific and social progress over us (most likely) but we will have no trouble coming up to speed if we get access to their libraries. It's a lot harder to figure something out for the first time than it is to learn it once someone else has figured it out.

None of those examples you mentioned had a lack of evidence, which is why we changed our perspective on how those things worked. The opposition to them was not scientific.

What's interesting to me is while we have no reference for how close we are to understanding ultimate reality, you are nevertheless sure enough in your beliefs to call ancestral knowledge and other species 'embarassing'.

To all your "embarassing" examples: what would have been the plausible alternative?

"people would have understood mental illness like we do today" and "people would have had a better understanding of abiogenesis" is emphatically not a possibility.

People saw mental illness, were afraid of it, and put it into the very best system with explanatory power they had at their disposal.

I can't see anything qwrong with that, and certainly don't see why you should laugh at them.

On the point of mental illness, Foucault is well known for his view on it (quoting from SEP):

>But, according to Foucault, the new idea that the mad were merely sick (“mentally” ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at all a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy or the seventeenth-eighteenth-century view of madness as a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments.