Are we just Fish ?

A news story heard recently got me thinking.  It involved a washed up motorcycle on the shores of British Columbia, and the fact it had drifted on the North Pacific Current after being washed out to sea on last year's Tsunami that hit Japan.  A lovely little human interest story.  But it seeded my brain with thoughts of fish, reality, the universe and more.

Bear with me here, and see if you connect the same dots that I did.

Imagine for a moment you're a small fish, happily swimming near the surface ("not one of those cliché reef fish)  Your world involves the food that drifts past, the school you're part of,  and avoidance of occasional predators that come your way. All is good, and assuming you're an intelligent little fish, you notice that occasionally your surroundings change a little.  You're sentient to the idea that your world exists on a current, and over some great expanse of time, it will actually cycle through the same static piece of water.  You are part of that same North Pacific current that carries human stuff from one continent to another, and at some point in the year the area you're in tastes/smells like Japan, and in others it tastes/smells like North America's west coast.  If you are a very intelligent little fish, you'd recognize that it's actually you drifting into the predator's water, not the other way around, and you may be able to be proactive about it. Now, you are still a fish, so awareness doesn't extend beyond the water - that's your world, but you can see the greater cycle at play, and might try to espouse the meaning of your life from it.

Now let's pretend to be humans.  We're on a little blue planet, and we're smart enough to see revolution around the nearest star (but even that to be fair is a recently solid fact), and you are lead to understand that system revolves around the galaxy in a spiral arm, and that galaxy is moving in the bigger universe too.  Effectively, while there are more planes of depth in the human model, we are essentially seeing the same thing as the intelligent fish.  We've come to grips with the concepts of movement, the size of the universe and can accurately predict where we'll be in X time, but not much else.  Like the fish, we strive to understand the meaning of life from what we see.  Like the fish, we probably can't do this easily.

So let's focus back on our fish for a moment.  Do they see that they are in water, and that an entire different reality exists on land, and they are in fact on a planet ?  Nope.  Do they understand the concept of that planet's movement, nope.  To be fair, they probably don't have their fins fully wrapped around the time concept either.  We consider the fish not to be an intelligent form of life, really they're present to sustain the natural balance in that ecosystem, and as a food source.

If I think about us again, from this train of thought we might conclude that we also might be living a reality that doesn't take everything into account.  There may be a 'land' equivalent that we can't perceive. We may not see the multiple dimensions around us, or perhaps we live at a different frequency than others.  In fact, we may be viewed relatively by others with deeper senses of perception as merely 'fish'.    The science underlying this conjecture is sound by the way.  Astrophysicists today are trying to decode the whole picture and place where we sit as the older models of how the universe hangs together no longer hold water.

Makes you think a little, yes ?