Maybe other intelligent life forms don’t make the same assumptions that we do that lead to the statement that there are two “apples,” and maybe mathematics isn’t universal.
That just shows that “Apple” isn’t necessarily universal, and doesn’t actually disprove the universality of the concept of “two.”
There are a ton of different physical ways to represent the Fibonacci sequence, for example, and I would imagine the first contact looks for ways to find the mutually understood medium by both sides: raised symbols, pulses of radiation, pulses of vibrations, physical pebbles arranged in a line, physical pebbles manipulated over a timeline, etc.
Once we establish a common medium, we’d explore mutual understanding of prime numbers, approximations of pi/e/phi, and things like that.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
First of all, there has been a lot of research into what the minimal set of assumptions you need is to reproduce what we consider “basic math” and also what happens if you tweak those assumptions.
Second of all, the main goal for science and the type of math we use for science is to effectively model the world we live in.
Any aliens that live in the same universe are subject to the same physics, and any civilization advanced enough to detect our messages will know some basic universal facts about the world, and those facts are what we hope to use as the basis for starting communication.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
there’d a big difference between experiencing a force and describing it though. Imagine attempting to describe proprioception to a race of spherical beings with no sense of touch.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Sure, but to get the communication started you would start with facts you’d agree on, like the positions of stars or basic chemistry.
bmebenji@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Yeah you’re right, the main goal of science and the math we use for science is to model the universe. That model is completely subjective. The more we learn about the universe, the more the model changes. The way we learn is limited by our 5 senses and our mental models for the immediate universe around us.
That model is something of a language itself, and if a language is subjectively limited then I don’t think it can be universal
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The model we currently have for the universe goes well beyond anything we could learn with our natural senses and the way we intuitively think about the world because of those senses.
It’s true that we keep refining our models an it’s ver possible that an alien would have slightly different models, but at the end of the day, we are trying to describe the same universe and those models are going to overlap a lot because of that.