How Aliens would Reason?

To consider how an intelligent species elsewhere in the universe might reason, we must first answer a more fundamental question, the one that sparked this inquiry: Why do we reason the way we do?

This question came to my mind on 24 August 2025, at 8:55 PM. The curfew time at my hostel is 9:00 PM, and I saw a security manager shouting at one of the guards. “Why are you just standing there maa…. Start whistling! It’s curfew time!?” he yelled.

His accent caught my attention, immediately followed by a thought: the logic behind his sentence would have been the same even if he had said it in perfect Tamil. For any two languages, evolved in different parts of the world, the core logic of a sentence remains the same, despite changes in grammar and structure.

It seems that we humans reason with some “fundamental components”(if there’s anything like that) - concepts like if, or, else, then, and how. If you were to count them, I am sure the list would not be long. But can we safely assume that these components are universal?

Is it possible for an alien species, having evolved in a completely different part of the universe, to possess fundamentally different components of reasoning?

If the answer is yes, can we even begin to imagine what their logic would look like using only ‘our’ components? Are we, and is everything we invent and produce, fundamentally bounded by the limits of our own tools of reason?

The best answer I have as of now is, ‘I am not sure’.