I sometimes wonder why I like reading sci-fi about aliens so much- and I mean alien aliens, the real weirdos, like Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers or Moties. I mean, if they get too alien (the aliens in Blindsight or the planet in Solaris), then they aren't quite as enjoyable anymore, though I still loved those books. I personally believe that it has something to do with my (mild, and thankfully subsiding) case of misanthropy- my wish to get to a perspective other than the merely human. We don't really have one around, at least that we've figured out how to talk to, but that's what we've got science fiction for- to get pictures of things we can't see.
But that's kind of hard, and probably impossible to do correctly. We can't really imagine something truly inhuman- so we have to compromise. Instead of making a brand new picture, we edit the ones that we have, and hope that it gets close enough.
And maybe that's what I like about it- the challenge. Not thinking outside of the box that is our head, but- pressing against it, distorting it, making a different box to think in, and seeing what that's like.
We probably aren't going to figure out a lot about what it's like to be an alien from the inside. But maybe we can figure out a little bit more about what humans are like from the outside.