*September 1, 2024* # Beings in The Middle ![[bug2.png]] > Photo by Thorben Danke (See more of his work on [Six Feet Art](https://sagaoptics.de) or [twitter](https://x.com/sagaOptics)!) At some point everyone wonders: *what if I'm a bug*? If I were a bug, I would see a world like the one I imagine a housefly sees. I would see giant entities looming above and doing things, very slowly. They would be more or less indifferent to me, and occasionally hostile. Would it be obvious? Really I have no idea what a fly's world looks like. Unlike flies, *human* beings live in a world of imagination. Imagination as in fairytale, and imagination as in sandbox. Our perceptions tend to be some part reality and another part fiction. In the lens of perception, a realistic *hallucination* of the world is more valuable to our survival than a perfect image of the reality itself. It seems paradoxical though. Aren't the best decisions made from a realistic viewpoint? Well, yes, but most decisions have to happen quickly. In potential life-or-death situations for example, it's good for perception to bend the truth. If a grizzly bear is 100m away, there's no real harm in believing it's 25m away. You'll give it more space and leave before it sees you. This is known as [Fitness Beats Truth](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33231784/). On one hand perception is tool to align ourselves with reality, but on the other, it's also another lever for evolution to steer us towards or away from things that are approximately "good" or "bad". So coming back to the fly, in some ways it may have a keener sense of reality than I do. We can only really understand other beings to the extent that they are like us. Lots of little things are almost nothing like us, neither are big things. We look down and see fast little bugs with simple goals, we look up and see slow corporate entities complex beyond all reason. We're looking at it all from somewhere in between. If we were the bugs in some bigger world, it would look just about the way it does now... There's this quote from Alan Watts : > *Wherever you are and whoever you are and whatever you are, you're in the middle. That's the game. Your senses extend a certain direction, in all directions and, therefore, give you the impression of being in the middle. Because the definition of a person is where you look from.* > > *Now, everything in the world feels like that. And also it has it's own kind. You see spiders and hydras and sea urchins and so on don't look very natural to us. We say, "Well, I won't want to look like that." But they say when they see us, "Well, what kind of an awful thing is that? And what a lot of nonsense it does."* I heard it originally in [this bizarre video game trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYHp8LwBUzo&t=8s) ^[From my friend [Leah Altman](https://643189.cargo.site)]. "Perception", "truth", and "reality" could have pretty independent lineages. They're often adjacent, but there's nothing forcing that to happen. We just exist at an interesting point where they are often united.