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> By comprehend I mean you, as an ant, "understand" a bug in a sense that you can predict its movements, eat it, force it to go away, or breed the thing if you find its symbiotically useful, in a sense you have internal world model of a thing, comprehend. By that definition, many mammals and birds, if not even the vast majority, actually understand us then, thus proving that simpler lifeforms can understand much more complex ones. Probably some of the bigger fish, reptiles and amphibians too. The difference between ants and us is more one of simple scale. If we had been the size of ants, we also wouldn't have been able to do anything against a gorilla, even with a lot of current technologies. And yes, if it turns out there exist aliens the size of planets or solar systems, we won't have any realistic way of defending against them if they are aggressive. But that still won't mean we couldn't comprehend some of what they do, at least enough to realize they are an intelligent life form. The bigger problem would of course be if they are (a) not made of any form of matter we recognize (imagine dark matter aliens, though that doesn't seem plausible in our current physical models), or (b) live at entirely different time scales than us, say having "neurons" that fire once in a thousand years, or once per planck time. |