An interesting question. We don't want to fall into the trap of speciesism or planetism. Some sea creature do wave there tentacles in a pretty way, even if all they are communicating is "come a little closer so I can grab you" or "I am just chilling out letting the ocean currents swish me back and forth." I can easily imagine, as sentience advances, that these behaviors could develop into two forms of dance -- like Latin (come closer so I can grab you) and ballroom (just chillin' and swayin' to the music) -- that earth people would find beautiful in much the same way as the methane-breathers do.
The electromagnetic pulses could be detected artificially and augmented in various ways so that we could experience them -- like displaying a graph of the primary frequencies of the Fourier series, very pretty. Sort of like how the soundbox of a violin shapes and amplifies the scraping of a bow across the strings of a fiddle and produces a pretty sound.
Maybe the common musicality yardstick could be stretched a little further after all. :yes:
Actually, at the risk of falling afoul of political correctness, speciesism, I believe, (and, by conceptual extension only, planetism, since we don't yet know for a certainty that it's even necessary, Hollywood movies and Discovery Channel documentaries notwithstanding
), is something we
should fall for, and it's not a trap.
Let me be precise: by my provincial way of thinking, "sentience" is the ability to comprehend and manipulate logic, including the basic idea of cause and effect (although on that measure, it's not entirely clear, on the evidence of Sarah Palin's interviews, that all human beings qualify
. This was just a throw-away one-liner, so I'm hoping that I won't be bombarded with flaming from SarahPAC). I can envision that communication would be possible with aliens with regard to physically demonstrable matters, including mathematics, physics, and even that if you (the alien) electromagnetically flux in a certain pattern, I know it means that I should come no closer, and similarly that you will understand that if I brandish a golf club at you, it means something roughly similar (unless we are on a course, and even then you should be wary).
However, sentience is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the ability to share a common experience of feeling, which, when we peel away all of the philosophical and analytical layers, is what art ultimately boils down to. The reason that human beings, at least potentially, are able to achieve this is because we have in common a certain neurological arrangement, and hardwired emotional responses to certain types of stimuli that we have in retrospect recognized and labelled as "aesthetic". Like rhythm, or melody, harmony, or analogous phenomena in movement or pictures. These phenomena can be analyzed logically or mathematically, but our emotional response to them (and, indeed the ability to "emotionally" respond) is part of our unique evolutionary legacy, which cannot be replicated by any other beings, sentient or otherwise, unless they, by some miracle of serendipity, have also wound up being so similar to human beings that we could probably mate and reproduce (one of the charming lunacies of space operas such as Star Trek).
To think otherwise is to fall into the much more serious "trap" of anthropomorphism. Take the example of humpback whales. We listen to what we call their "songs" (anthropomorphism at its finest), and are charmed, because we project onto those emanations qualities of human song by analogy. But I think that it is at least as likely (as you imply) that the humpback is saying something like: "That's a nice looking school of my favorite krill right there", or "Gads, my fluke is itching and it's driving me nuts that I can't get at it", with no other intention whatsoever. But, IMHO, you are not following this accurate observation, that their experience of the calls is not our experience, to its logical conclusion. And in the case of whales (and even more so for, say, chimpanzees or for dogs), we at least have some scientific evidence to support our intuition that, on some level, they share the ability to experience the neural phenomenon that we call emotion, because we share a mammalian lineage.
Even if we stipulate, for argument sake, that the creatures of Neptune possessed artistic intention in the way that we understand the term, I believe that, just on purely perceptual grounds, it is impossible for us to feel whatever it is that they feel. If you have to view an oscilloscope to perceive the action, this is very different from direct perception via your own pair of antennae. Just as, to use a human example, it is a very different matter actually viewing a performance vs. reading a detailed written account of that performance.
More fundamental, however, is the issue of how that information is processed, and the neurological effect that it creates. If we make the reasonable assumption that the evolutionary histories are completely alien to each other, is it safe to think that they even have the internal plumbing that make possible "emotions" or "feelings", and therefore "art", in the way that we define the terms? Although a plausible case can be made that sentience has evolutionary advantages, it is not clear to me that it is necessarily linked to the very idiosyncratically evolved capacities for emotion that we call the aesthetic sensibility (that is to say, our tendency to believe in the inevitability of that coupling is spurious, though understandable, since we know of only one example of sentience).
The methane-breathing "mollusks" of Neptune (and the quotation marks were there by implication in my original post) may exhibit phenomena that we find ravishing, but this would be in the sense that we would can view "found art" or whale calls as ravishing: the artists in this case are not the Neptunians or the humpbacks, they are ourselves.
(And apologies to Doris for contributing even further to the OT drift. But I blame Mathman fully as much as myself
. I believe I'm feeling a certain (decidedly un-aesthetic) emotion now
:.
) seems genuine, as opposed to transient or fluky (a Michelle Kwan, as compared to a Kimmie Meissner).
