Hacker News Reader

Why can't you fathom that something cannot be incomprehensible to the human mind?

Imagine an ant sitting on your arm. Do you believe it's cognizant and aware of your existence? Now imagine humanity being the ant to a higher intelligence.

View on HN

I think it's a flawed analogy. An ant doesn't possess any abstract thinking. No matter how you'd dumb it down, an ant won't understand you're a thinking entity because it has no such concept.

Aliens might be very different from us, but surely there's some dumbed down way we could recognize/conceptualize them. There might be some cases of extremely enigmatic alien species, but I think that would be rather rare, and the majority would be quite recognizable (physical body, metabolism, reproduction).

Ants don't know they lack conceptual thinking. There can be some perspective or perception that we simply don't know that we lack.

For example if there's life that exists across 7 spatial dimensions instead of 3, how would we parse it? I'm not asking as a gotcha question, if you have a legit answer I'm very curious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com