It’s an interesting thought - even with a translator, could their cognition and world be so alien to us as to be incompressible? I would think largely not - pa

It’s an interesting thought - even with a translator, could their cognition and world be so alien to us as to be incompressible? I would think largely not - particularly for mammals - it’s easy to think you have nothing in common with a shrew or a whale, but we are quite recent cousins, and much of our cognitive architecture and sensorium is the same. That said, there could well be challenges and revelations beyond the obvious - for instance, can domesticated members of a species communicate with their wild cousins, or have they lost their culture/language? Cetaceans - do they talk in holograms? These are perhaps still obvious questions, but if it’s something we figure out, we may get answers to things we’ve never even considered asking.