created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified
tags: Animals
I love images like this. From the chickadee’s perspective there is a bird on the page. It might understand this. Certain animals might be fooled (like a human being spooked by a cutout man.) There are also symbols on the page that it wouldn’t understand. These symbols are information about the Chickadee itself. We can imagine it landing, or discovering an even more exhaustive list of details (wingspan, lifespan, migration). But even though it is looking directly at these symbols, which explicitly reveal answers to mysteries, it has no clue (perhaps even know comprehension of the mystery themselves, as in what is a lifespan in years or a life to a bird?). In years and years and years of studying the text it might evolve some understanding, but not this bird. This bird will not be uplifted. It will not understand in this life. Even if we presume a future bird capable of understanding the text on the page, the book will be destroyed. It’ll have to derive its own units, and measurements.
These birds have short lifespans. Imagine a chickadee in a video on youtube, or video a group of them in flight. The lifespan of a bird might be a few years, so within the time the video was uploaded to this time the entire conscious memory of the group has died off. Not a single member that experienced that flight (that moment in time) you see remain. How does the chickadee develop a memory, or a culture that’ll endure like pages? Generations will live and die but not leave any books which to read about itself. All of these animals you see in film, likely soon dead without understanding they were filmed.
Same thought, I think of a bookworm. It eats the pages of the book, deep in the stacks. It might eat the pages in the book of bookworms that describes its functions and lifespan, and population, stories of bookworms distant. But instead it sleeps within the pages, in a hole it bore. It sleeps. It doesn’t understand that it lives wrapped in the warm embrace of an answer. The answer is just food. The answer is a hole to rest in.
But this is an important image because where I feel completely surrounded by greater unknowns here I am looking into a mirror. I put myself into the mind of the bird and it is suddenly an unknown that I can know. I see these symbols on the page and understand them. It makes it seem like I am a chickadee and there are symbols that I might find and land on that describe me, or certain mysteries even beyond my details.
And that idea of me being this chickadee or bookworm is also compelling, but not saying I believe this. But particularly the concept of the destroyed bird book, some tome that existed in the past that if I were able to read it I would have answers about my existence. And the fact that I could look at this object, and see something but not even realize that it was the answers I sought. As if I could peer into my hand and read it.
Exploratory Ant
Even the most exploratory of ants will never find certain rare, placed pieces of sweets, or massive caches of delicacies in a storeroom. They will live their lives toiling over sustaining the anthill, going out and taking morsels back. We have machines that pour out rivers of sugar. A cake, somewhere, sits in freezer. No ant will know of it.
Timescale beyond me
I was looking at my cat. Every Sunday she has a schedule. I get the sense that she is aware that I’ll have a visitor each Sunday, and prepares for this by hiding.
With this I wondered if she had an awareness of the day, or it was an awareness of the weekend. Regardless I said to myself, “She doesn’t understand this scale of time. The cyclical nature of a week.”
As in say she isn’t really conscious of it. Maybe, say all she can do is imagine who is here, on this single day and react to that.
But I was wondering if I could also then apply that to everything and my understanding.
She doesn’t understand time, so I don’t understand Time.
If her “unit of memory” for time only gives her a sense of a day, or a week but not an understanding of the seasons or understanding of the decade, it is also trivially true that I am unware of deep, long cycles.
Surely this relates to timescales I can speak, “oh a century” and further where I cannot predict who visits me in a century, and if I should hide.