And, echoing your point, when we ask what that better thing is, it will be incomprehensible

There is a very interesting theory that science (the way we think the universe works) is largely a function of how human cognition works.

Back when I spent a lot of time on science forums, one of the members was a philosopher who would argue for pure idealism: our only knowledge of the world comes only from our senses, so our internally-created universe is the only one that exists.

We can't know anything about an external universe so believing it is there is purely an act of faith. As a "naive realist" I disagreed but could not disagree with any of his arguments

Well, your comment about not understanding a (real) AI got me thinking about the (few) good stories about encounters with intelligent but incomprehensible aliens.

And now you have reminded me of one story with fluid/plasma based intelligences where calculus (involving continuous flows, etc) was absolutely basic to them, but integer arithmetic was advanced math.

Quite possibly!