"cognition gap" Yeah... this is why I suspect we may see signs of alien life, but just not know what we're looking at. You're not alone in thinking of intellig

"cognition gap" Yeah... this is why I suspect we may see signs of alien life, but just not know what we're looking at. You're not alone in thinking of intelligence as some kind of scalar quantity from bacteria to super beings, and if only we could find creatures in our range, we'll be able to communicate Embedded in our conception of intelligence is us. We measure intelligence by what we think is important. But creative approaches to fitness in radically different environments will be multidimensional and multivalent, extremely difficult to judge by our own standards I speculate that if we were to find aliens, we could never communicate beyond basic Skinnerian reward and punishment schema, if that, never mind prime numbers and such, no matter how sophisticated they are. We wouldn't even really be certain if we were witnessing intelligent behavior or autonomic processes, and neither could they. We can't even understand whales or dolphins, and those would be vastly easier to understand than anything without DNA, emergent from a completely different planet How could we possibly communicate with a civilization that communicates in the time scale of oaktrees, or are sessile, or communicate using flashes of microwaves in patterns we have no hope of even discerning?