You may need to quantize data for error correction (as in "a trigger that differentiates symbol A from symbol B"), but you don't need numbers for that (as in "a

You may need to quantize data for error correction (as in "a trigger that differentiates symbol A from symbol B"), but you don't need numbers for that (as in "an arbitrary chaining of the sequence operator", which is the base of natural numbers). You can have logic -binary or not- to define rules of inference, without defining a particular rule of inference for numbers (measuring quantities). As someone else sort of implied elsewhere [1], if aliens use mathematics at all, it would probably be easier to reason with them in terms of topology rather than number theory. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500