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I actually think there's a bit of an answer to that, in the No Free Lunch theorem. To "experience" Beethoven's 9th Symphony, you need cognitive biases that it can tickle in the way that Beethoven intended. An alien missing those biases won't "get it", but then they'll get things we won't. But there's no solution to having the right biases for everything. All we can do is throw a lot of things at it and hope for the best, and what's more, that's the best we or any alien in the physical universe could do.

(Heck, you don't even need a deaf species. There's a lot of reason to believe that birds don't experience music the way we do, and they're not even strictly speaking "aliens".)

So there's no particular gain to worrying about being limited to "human" senses, because there is no actionable way to "transcend" them in that sense other than by being something other than what you are. It's certain to be true, there's nothing to be done about it that we aren't already doing, and thus, it isn't really an interesting criticism to vaguely suggest that we should somehow be something other than ourselves.

I wasn't suggesting that we should be other than ourselves - just that, by being ourselves, there are things that we don't "get", even when we can see the data.

> Hearing Beethoven's Ninth is really different from studying the frequencies with an oscilloscope.

I'm not sure that's a good analogy. When you hear Beethoven's Ninth, you're not understanding it any more than someone who drives a car is understanding the car. You can enjoy it. Which is to say, you have an appreciation for its acoustic beauty but that doesn't really have anything to do with understanding it.

Perhaps there is some intelligence that set up the cosmos and they get some aesthetic pleasure from it. And perhaps our experience is too foreign from those being's to get the same pleasure from it but that does not mean that minus that experience we can't understand entirely how it works.

> Which is to say, you have an appreciation for its acoustic beauty but that doesn't really have anything to do with understanding it.

Beethoven's Ninth has words (at least, the third movement does). If you speak German, you can understand them.

Access to higher dimensions? Aliens shaking their heads as we waste enormous amounts of energy to travel through R3 in a straight line instead of taking a short walk in R7.

This makes me think of a quote on humans and science.

Italo Calvino said, "science interests me precisely because of my efforts to escape anthropomorphic knowledge; at the same time, however, I'm convinced that our imagination can only be anthropomorphic".

I'm not sure how to take in this quote - I wonder where humans stand in the progression of science.

Useful note, I get this thought sometimes, too. And you write, “We can gather data via all these different frequencies and modes. And yet I wonder how much we're not getting, not because we don't have the data, but because we don't have the right... something.”

Do you mean some type of “receptor” that we might be unaware of? For instance, data is flowing by but we can’t recognize/capture it?

We also cavalierly assume that our brains are universal understanding machines. While we have no problem knowing that there are sounds we cannot hear, and light we cannot see, we're reluctant to admit that there are thoughts we cannot think. Concepts which may be true and universal, but which are literally inconceivable to us.

But if you believe the theory of evolution, there is no reason why you should assume that. Our brains evolved to give us a good enough answer, fast enough, enough of the time to give us an edge at surviving. Any ability to truly understand what's truly going on would be purely by accident.

It's a good analogy, although I feel compelled to point out that Beethoven never heard Beethoven's Ninth either, since he was profoundly deaf when he wrote it.

Would the idea of a flatlander being incapable of comprehending 3-space be similar to what you're thinking?

Probably. The flatlander may be able to create a 3-dimensional vector space as a mathematical construct, but still has no clue what it's like to walk around in 3D.