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).