[dinkleberg]

That is a fascinating idea. We do have a tendency (understandably) to try and understand the universe through our own lens. Our thinking is heavily tied to our sensory input, so it is challenging to imagine what having echolocation or magnetic senses might be like.

But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.

[totetsu]

It’s hard even to imagine how other humans, from another time or culture think. While we have similar sensory apparatus we the world we experience is constructed within our own consciousness, with all kinds of emotions and memories mixed in with the senses. If you think about your own mammalian physiological and emotional .. affective experience .. how it feels to run fast, be surprised, see something you want to eat.. then I think we can start to appreciate what it is like to think like a whale or a bat. Even though their sensory input is vastly different to use, they still construct their world with the same kind of equipment that we do

[glandium]

It's hard even to imagine how other humans, from our time and culture think. I have no clue how people experience life with aphantasia or no inner monologue. Yet these people exist, right now, among us.

[boppo1]

I think the 'no inner monologue' thing is overblown. I often don't have one as I go about my business because thinking in words would slow me down at ${task}. But if I'm driving or walking, then I will converse with myself at length. I'd be more likely to describe it as a dialogue though, because the way I perceive it, I'm talking to an imagined second party. It's still obviously me, but therf's a back-and-forth between different personalities.

[tempaccount420]

I don't think parent is talking about you then? You have an inner monologue.

[firecall]

Which reminds that I once read there is a tribe in of people who conceptualise the future and past differently to western society…

The past to them is physically looking straight ahead, as that is what they can observe.

The future is conceptually and physically them looking over their shoulder behind them, as that is what they can’t see.

I might be mangling it somewhat! :-)

[mcswell]

They conceptualize the past and future exactly the same as you do; the past is something they remember (some of), the future is something they can only guess about. Their language talks about it differently, that's all.

[ChainOfFools]

Although it is not built into the grammar of our language I've come across a description very similar to this, by CS Lewis, describing his perception of time as that of a passenger on a train who's riding with their back to the engine.

analogies develop further from there, such as events being passed at the moment moving very quickly, and large in one's field of view, and to some extent one js able to see around them and order their importance by size and speed with respect to one's own position. But they're moving fast and it's hard to take in all the detail at once, and being so close the more proximal ones obscure your view of the ones further away though the latter may actually be in fact larger or more significant. Only as they all recede into the distance of the past does their relative significance with respect to each other become more evident.

[WalterBright]

> But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.

The reason is how far back their line diverged from ours. The nearer the point of divergence, the more reasonable it is to apply how things work for us.