A few years ago, a long period of going in and out of depression made me realise how reality, our experience of the world, can change dramatically from one day to the next. Even within minutes. Which experience is the true experience? Is there an objective world out there independent of you and me? It doesn’t feel as if it is you that has changed, it feels like the world has changed, that the act of living is somehow different. Taking antidepressants and realising that those little pills can, again, change your reality, can be very disconcerting.
One main theory of how mimicry works in Nature says that it doesn’t really work: that mimicry is an illusion of our clever minds that are in constant look for patterns and work by comparing and spotting differences and similitudes. It is in this way that we see a pair of eyes on the wings of a butterfly, camouflage where our eyes fail to see differences. We create a world that fits our mental models and processes, then we turn things upside down and see those attributes not in us, but in the world.