Borderliners
By Peter Hoeg
Through its
web the spider did not sense the whole world.
It sensed only that part of it that the web could pick up. Direction, distance, maybe the approximate
weight of its quarry, maybe its size. But certainly not much more.
Thus, too, with science and its
twin, industrial technology. Physics
extends its web out into the universe or down into matter, and thinks it is
discovering ever greater slices of reality.
It might be feared that this is a
fallacy, that is what Uexkull was on the verge of believing. If the spider extended its web further,
beyond the seventy-five centimetres, it would still only be able sense what lay
in its own and the web’s nature to sense.
It would not find a new reality.
It would discover more of what it already knew. Of what lay beyond – colours, birds, smells,
moles, people, sisters, God, the trigonometric functions, measurement of time,
time itself – it would still be hovering in absolute ignorance.
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