This is clearly not true. If the aliens happened to be 10% or 1000% of our size, their concept of a relevant physical feature would be very different.
Maps are basically feature extraction -> data compression. The feature extraction part is subjective and depends on the experience of a species.
A map of cellphone towers is useless to a cat. A map of blobblytoids is useless to a human who doesn't know what a blobblytoid is or how to recognise one.
A human may have some vague awareness that something is there, but it's also possible that blobblytoids look like random noise, or like weird probabilistic anomalies that travel around inside a multidimensional space, or like something completely unimaginable.
So in the limit features can't be extracted because they are invisible to a different consciousness. They can still be physically present, but their meaning as a feature of interest depends on having a subjective referent for them.
This seems to be something many humans struggle with. We assume everyone else - including other humans - has the same set of referents, and therefore our personal feature maps are somehow universal.
Of course they aren't. They aren't even universal among humans, never mind a completely unknown alien species.
I think there is some sort of threshold analogous to Turing-completeness (it probably is just Turing-completeness) when it comes to intelligence, in that information is eventually accessible to any system that passes it.
If there is a species that thinks in terms of things that humans never could understand, then I would argue that species isn't part of our physical reality. If their expression of concepts is at all rooted in physical reality, then we, as physical beings, would have access to it. Maybe not the first person that sees it, nor the second, nor their great-great-great-grandchildren, but at some point their children could build things/begin to appreciate what was being communicated.
> If there is a species that thinks in terms of things that humans never could understand, then I would argue that species isn't part of our physical reality.
What if they think can think in our terms AND they can think thoughts we are physically unable to, thoughts that are literally inconceivable?
If the thoughts have any interaction at all between each other, we would be able to leverage that to understand those higher-level thoughts to the degree that they affect the ones on our level. As an analogy, we can project an N dimensional object onto N! planes and get a complete, but not intuitive, description of what it is.
Maybe they know the exact value of Chaitin's constant, but at least we know its properties.
Yes, the exact sense in which maps are bloogidy-blop to one another may vary considerably, but if they cover the same geographic region there'll be some bloogidy-blop, ie common reference points, which would relate to the maps. Maybe blobblytoids always go in valleys. Or whatever.
We seem in agreement on the object question in any case.
Maps are basically feature extraction -> data compression. The feature extraction part is subjective and depends on the experience of a species.
A map of cellphone towers is useless to a cat. A map of blobblytoids is useless to a human who doesn't know what a blobblytoid is or how to recognise one.
A human may have some vague awareness that something is there, but it's also possible that blobblytoids look like random noise, or like weird probabilistic anomalies that travel around inside a multidimensional space, or like something completely unimaginable.
So in the limit features can't be extracted because they are invisible to a different consciousness. They can still be physically present, but their meaning as a feature of interest depends on having a subjective referent for them.
This seems to be something many humans struggle with. We assume everyone else - including other humans - has the same set of referents, and therefore our personal feature maps are somehow universal.
Of course they aren't. They aren't even universal among humans, never mind a completely unknown alien species.