The original artwork for this strip is available for purchase. See the original artwork information page for more information.
Notes: Pasted-in dialog changes in the last panel.
The original artwork for this strip is available for purchase. See the original artwork information page for more information.
Notes: Pasted-in dialog changes in the last panel.
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To ants, the behavior of other animals is as inscrutible as the nature of terrain. They don’t ask ‘why is this deer walking by’ or ‘why is this tree here’. Humans do not seem especially inscrutible; we walk through their territory like everything else. But then, they don’t see the connection between humans and sidewalks and houses.
Human beings ask deeper questions about where things around us came from. We seem to have a good idea of how to tell when we’ve arrived at a ‘complete picture’, a consistent account that explains everything, though we don’t really have any complete pictures yet. So yeah, I guess there could be stuff we’re incapable of understanding, but it’s also possible that there aren’t any such things, that we will forever increase our knowledge.
Notice though, that she referred to herself and not all of human(or furry)kind when asking the question if there is anything she cannot understand.
I think she is talking about the limitation inherent in one life, how though there may be nothing that cannot eventually be explained, there will always be some things that cannot be made explicable in just one lifetime, her lifetime.
It is also entirely possible that there are those things so incomprehensible, without any stepping stones to them, that we will always try to ignore them or make up our own explanations for why they are, and persistently ignore the obvious holes in our own theories. Because of our ignorance, we enforce our own ignorance.
Makes me think of this metaphor where an ant colony is a brain, and the ants are the neurons.
In the Orion’s Arm Universe Project, there are AIs that are this incomprehensibly beyond humans. And AIs incomprehensibly beyond those AIs. And so on for six levels.