It is, and I think there was previously a general view that only humans have language that handles abstractions like counterfactuals and non-present objects, wh

It is, and I think there was previously a general view that only humans have language that handles abstractions like counterfactuals and non-present objects, which was disproven by border collies searching for named objects. The "riding an alien," frame opens up the idea of other intelligences to ask the question of, is there an analogy where if let's say most humans and our language lacked the tools to communicate or reason together about things that were not there in the room with us, how would you communicate with those people? It's a bit like Plato's Cave, but imo, the answer is math. Language is not the substrate for cognition and the mind, math is. The way we communicate concepts to horses, interestingly, is via geometry. A horse has no concept of lines and circles, but by establishing a foundation of lines, circles and other figures, we build language with them by associating movements that express our intentions with those figures and points on them. The reason it's not just "training," and I would argue it's language, is because once you have established this geometric languge, a horse can determine your intentions from the ground, meters away, and not on its back. Modern olympic dressage in this sense is a kind of cargo cult that preserves some of these ideas and techniques, but in a weird ritual pagentry form, where the deeper art is something each individual practices. I'd speculate that humans have been doing math as long as we've been riding horses isn't a total coincidence. It makes one wonder what else geometry can be a vehicle for communicating, and what it might mean to encode intentions via geometry for us. It's worth re-watching the Ted Chiang / Denis Villeneuve movie Arrival and Amy Adams' characters' flashbacks in it for a really beautiful illustration of this.