Time stands still. I peer into the world right in front of me. There is only me. I know that I am my brain and my brain is me. The world in front of me is not truly as I perceive it. The way I see this world is not how a dog, a bird, or a tiny ant would perceive it. To an ant, how would it react to the rain. What color is it--if it even has a color. How does time flow for an ant? A queen ant can live up to 30 years! How does the queen react to her children only living for a few months to a few years. Males can die as young as three weeks. Does she care? Does she even know? For her to live 30 years, at some point I would assume she would start having thoughts far above the average ant with such limited time on this earth. Does she have dreams, and have the dreams of a queen ant ever changed her behavior upon waking? In the entire history of this world, with so many ant colonies out there, and their lifespans being so short, has there even been an ant that was born and wanted more? Did it even achieve it's goal or goals? There are super colonies made up of hundreds of millions of ants. With numbers like that, there would have to be some form of unique ant cultures that have developed and changed over time.
There are people that think of ants as slaves to pheromones with no higher cognitive function. If that were true, would these super colonies not be like one giant brain? Living organisms acting as visible neurons on a wide scale sensory organism? In the ant colonies' eyes, are living creatures like energy that keep itself moving, or does it see everything more like cancers and tumors that only impede progress? If ant colonies as a whole could be considered like a moving being larger than the parts that make it up, then could it only be natural to assume that because trees and plants are all connected through the mycelia underground that entire jungles are also like giant living organisms larger than the sum of their parts? And if that were true, should it also be considered that all living things on earth are all just small parts of the greater whole that is the earth's consciousness? Are we like ants--overestimating our own importance because we cannot see beyond the bigger picture that is our colony?
