Would Aliens Make Art? A Thought Experiment About Consciousness

I started with what I thought was a fairly simple question: What would daily life actually be like for extraterrestrials?

I have long believed that extraterrestrial life exists. I don't need a spaceship to land on the White House lawn to find the proposition convincing. Given the extraordinary size of the universe, the number of stars and planets within it, and the chemistry we already know exists beyond Earth, the alternative—that life happened exactly once—seems to me the more extraordinary possibility.

But we tend to imagine extraterrestrial life only at the moment it intersects with us. We imagine first contact, strange signals, spacecraft and governments scrambling to respond.

We rarely imagine an alien on an ordinary Tuesday.

If extraterrestrial beings are biological organisms, I suspect much of their existence might be surprisingly mundane. They may acquire energy, rest, interact socially, avoid unpleasant things and seek pleasant ones. A civilization could possess technology that looks miraculous to us while its individual members still experience some extraterrestrial equivalent of boredom, attraction, irritation or having had a very long day.

Then, during a conversation with AI about this question, another occurred to me:

Would they make art?

Is Art a Universal Feature of Intelligence?

Technology is relatively easy to imagine arising elsewhere.

An intelligent species attempting to manipulate its environment has reasons to discover mathematics, materials, energy and engineering. Different civilizations might eventually arrive at similar solutions because they inhabit the same physical universe.

Art is different.

A painting does not need to exist. Neither does a symphony, a poem or a beautifully decorated bowl. Humans routinely devote extraordinary effort to making things whose value cannot be adequately explained by their usefulness.

If we discovered that another intelligent species independently made music, decorated objects, told stories or created images simply because it found them beautiful, we would have learned something profound.

Perhaps art isn't merely human.

Perhaps sufficiently complex consciousness begins making things simply because they ought to exist.

Then our discussion took another turn.

I suggested that advanced extraterrestrials might communicate telepathically.

That possibility changed the entire question.

Why Do Humans Need Art?

Human consciousness is private.

I can describe what I am experiencing, but I cannot actually give you my experience.

Language is our workaround.

I translate an internal state into words. Those words travel to you, and your brain reconstructs an approximation of what I meant. It is an astonishing system, but an imperfect one.

And sometimes words aren't enough.

So we paint.

We compose music.

We dance.

We write poetry.

We make films and sculptures and novels.

Perhaps one function of art is to accomplish something humans desperately want but biologically cannot do:

Let another person experience what it feels like to be me.

It turns out philosophers have approached versions of this problem before. György Lukács wrote about the difficulty of communicating the qualitative particulars of individual experience and humanity's desire to overcome our separation from one another. Philosophers studying "aesthetic ineffability" similarly examine experiences that resist complete translation into ordinary language.

Neuroscience adds another intriguing dimension. Research into the experience of art suggests that encountering an artwork can recruit some of the same mental machinery humans use to infer another person's intentions and emotional state.

In other words, when we look at something another person created, we may quite literally be trying to reconstruct another mind.

And suddenly my alien thought experiment became a human one.

What If Nobody Had a Private Mind?

Imagine an extraterrestrial species capable of genuine telepathy—not merely transmitting words silently, but communicating mental states directly.

An alien doesn't tell another alien, "I saw something beautiful today."

It transmits something closer to the experience itself.

Image. Emotion. Memory. Sensation. Meaning.

All at once.

Such creatures might find human speech extraordinarily strange. Imagine discovering a species whose members cannot exchange thoughts and therefore push air through their throats to produce sequences of noises that another brain must painstakingly decode.

To a telepathic civilization, we might appear terribly isolated.

But our isolation may have given us something they don't have.

Art.

If I could simply transmit my complete subjective experience to you, why would I need to paint it?

If you could experience my grief directly, why would I need to write a poem about it?

If consciousness were transparent, perhaps there would be less need to construct bridges between individual minds.

That leads to a provocative possibility:

Art may exist, at least partly, because consciousness is private.

Or Alien Art Could Be Stranger Than We Imagine

There is another possibility, however.

Telepathic extraterrestrials might make art after all.

But their art wouldn't necessarily communicate experiences.

It might create them.

Imagine an artist capable of constructing an entirely novel mental state—a deliberate combination of sensation, emotion, memory, abstraction and perception—and transmitting that experience directly into another consciousness.

Their equivalent of a masterpiece wouldn't be something you looked at or listened to.

You would experience it.

An alien artist wouldn't be saying:

"This is what it feels like to be me."

The artist might instead be saying:

"Here is something it has never felt like to be anyone."

And that brings me back to humans.

We often think of the privacy of consciousness as a limitation. No matter how much I love another person, I can never completely enter that person's mind. There will always be some distance between us.

But perhaps that distance has been extraordinarily productive.

For thousands of years, humans have been throwing things across it—paintings, songs, stories, dances, poems—hoping something makes it to the other side.

If we someday encounter another intelligence, its technology will undoubtedly tell us something about what intelligence can accomplish.

But I think I would ask a different question first.

Do you make art?

Because the answer might tell us something much bigger.

It might tell us whether beauty belongs to humanity—or whether somewhere deep inside consciousness itself exists the desire to make one mind understood by another.

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Author’s Disclosure: This essay grew out of a speculative conversation between the author and AI about extraterrestrial life, consciousness and communication. The discussion led to the central question explored here: whether art may exist, in part, because consciousness is private. AI helped develop the thought experiment, identify related philosophical and scientific ideas, and assist with drafting and editing. The author directed the discussion and is responsible for the essay’s arguments and conclusions.