Web Metaphors
Web metaphors abound: We talk about a food web, a web of life, a web of lies, the World Wide Web, the wood wide web (that’s a fascinating one to look up). Perhaps there are others. We sometimes find ourselves caught up in them, bound to them, surfing them, pondering them metaphorically.
Maybe this is a new one. I’m sure every hundredth monkey has come up with it though. Everything refers to everything, anyway. So, are there any original ideas anymore?
But first:
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Ed Yong’s book An Immense World is inexplicably adept at getting us beyond our own senses by describing other animals’ sensory capabilities that we ourselves do not have. Many of these senses, humans only began to understand recently. There are undoubtedly more that we may yet uncover.
In the book, Yong describes an orb weaver (a kind of spider) that cannot see the prey its survival depends upon catching and eating. It lacks the sensory organs to perceive its prey’s presence and location without spinning a web. Sensors on the orb weaver’s feet can detect changes in the tension along the strands of the web it has spun. In essence, the orb weaver has spun its own reality, or at least its perceptions of reality. But perception is reality. So goes the conventional wisdom.
To refine that conventional assertion:
Perception defines our reality. But reality is more than our perceptions. Perception limits our understanding of reality. Certainly, there are things we know exist that we cannot perceive, at least with our sensory organs alone. We know cells exist and that we are made up of them, but we cannot see them with our bare eyes. Same with atoms. There are sound frequencies we cannot hear. There are ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not visible to our visual systems. And so on…You get the idea. Other life forms can perceive some of these parts of reality that we cannot. But they are still part of reality whether we perceive them or not.
So, here’s the metaphor:
Maybe we are like the orb weavers in some way. Maybe our reality is a complex set of interacting stories we have spun based on our continuously corrupting memories. The stories we spin for ourselves define our reality, color our future perceptions, edit our previous memories, and essentially spin our reality as we experience it in real space-time. And, a recent study by Jonathan Adler, et al. also suggests that the way we shape the stories about our own lives can alter our biology. But as such, our reality has blind spots, like the orb weaver’s. Without our web of stories, our crude perceptions make no sense. That is the curse. The web is our framework of reality. It is our own self-generated matrix. Our own self-created and imposed web of lies (oops, metaphor squared). Is there a way to escape it? Is there a red pill for this?
What is it about web metaphors? We use them fairly often. Do we just like them? Or are they helpful to us? Or do they hint at a fundamental aspect of the universe? That everything is connected? Does it remind us that if we attend to our surroundings that we can intuit that interconnectedness? That we can feel it in the energy of the sun on our skin? Or the oxygen we breath? In everything around us? In everything we are or were or will be? Do the metaphors help to serve as reminders of the intuitions our ancestors had that we have since forgotten? The indigenous folktales that seem quaint but that instead convey wisdom we cannot understand and therefor cannot see as wisdom.
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Is everything a web metaphor? Is this a web metaphor?