Key Takeaways
Blurred vision of a giant
Ants can see humans, but only as large, shifting silhouettes. Their eyes detect movement and contrast far better than fine detail, so a person becomes a moving mass of light and shadow rather than a recognisable face.
A world made of scent and vibration
For ants, the deepest layer of reality is chemical and tactile. Pheromone trails, body odours and faint ground tremors guide them more reliably than sight, turning the landscape into a map of paths, danger and food that is constantly updated.
Power that feels like fate
From the scale of a colony, humans behave like unseen forces of fate. A hand destroys a nest, a shower of crumbs feeds hundreds, a jet of water floods intricate tunnels. None of it is addressed to ants, yet it reshapes their world in an instant.
Human questions looking upward
Humans often place themselves on the other side of the gap, wondering whether there is a mind or presence beyond the visible world and why communication with that “beyond” feels so uncertain. The tension between a sense of presence and the experience of silence runs through philosophy and religious thought.
Learning another way to listen
The comparison with ants suggests that even if something greater than us “replied,” humans might only be able to notice that response indirectly, in patterns of experience, conscience and meaning rather than in clear, spoken words.
Story & Details
How an ant sees a moving colossus
Picture an ant crossing a patch of soil. Its compound eyes are built from many tiny units, each capturing a fragment of light. Together they create a wide but low-resolution mosaic of the world. Movement stands out; sharp edges do not.
When a human walks by, the ant does not register eyes, expression or clothing. It perceives a huge dark shape shifting against the sky, a change in brightness, a rush of air and a faint tremor underfoot. What feels to a person like an ordinary step can resemble, at ant scale, a travelling eclipse and a small earthquake.
From above, the same moment looks trivial: a person taking a few steps through a garden, hardly aware that anything lives beneath their shoes. Two realities pass through one another, each mostly blind to the other’s meaning.
The hidden language of the colony
Sight is only the thinnest layer of an ant’s world. Beneath it lies a dense language of chemicals and touch. Ants lay down and follow pheromone trails to organise foraging and defence. A lone scout that finds food returns while leaving a faint chemical line; if others follow and confirm that the source is rich, they reinforce the trail, thickening an invisible road across the ground.
Over time, these trails form a transport network that constantly adjusts as food disappears or obstacles appear. Each individual is both messenger and reader, picking up signals with its antennae and adding new ones as it walks. What looks from a human distance like a restless line of insects is, at their level, a fast and complex conversation about where to go and what to do next.
Giants who never send a message
Change the vantage point again. A child crumbles a biscuit on a paving stone. For the ants, food suddenly appears where before there was nothing. A gardener turns a hose on a dry patch; underground chambers flood, and the colony races to move brood and queen. Someone idly pokes at a mound, collapsing carefully built galleries with the tip of a stick.
From the human side, none of this is intended as a message. These are side-effects of other aims: eating, watering plants, satisfying curiosity. From the perspective of the ants, though, these events might as well be acts of fate. They are huge, abrupt and beyond appeal.
Even if a human wanted to reassure a colony, there is no obvious way to do it. Gentle words, written signs, even carefully placed food mean nothing in the categories ants can actually perceive. They recognise chemicals, vibrations, temperature and the presence or absence of accessible resources. They do not recognise promise, apology or explanation. The gap in understanding is built into their senses and their scale.
Turning the mirror upward
Humans often reverse that scene in their imagination. Instead of being the giant who cannot be understood, they imagine themselves as the tiny being wondering if anyone larger is paying attention. Religious traditions and the philosophies that analyse them are full of questions about how, or whether, a human life can be in contact with a reality that goes beyond nature as we normally see it.
Accounts of such contact differ dramatically. Some describe clear phrases heard in prayer or vision. Others speak of a shift in how ordinary life appears: a steady sense of being accompanied, judged or called, without any distinct voice. Sometimes there is no single dramatic moment at all, only a long series of small events that, in hindsight, seem to point in a particular direction.
Thinkers who study these experiences ask what, if anything, they show. Are they windows onto something beyond, or mirrors held up to the human mind? How much weight should they carry? Central to many of these discussions is a familiar feeling: speaking into silence and hoping that the silence is not empty.
Wanting not just signs, but an answer
The comparison with ants shows why that feeling can be so sharp. A colony may receive food, shelter or disaster as a result of human actions, but it never receives what humans would call an answer. There is no shared language, no way to form mutual understanding, no possibility of conversation in the human sense.
Many people who pray or reflect on the possibility of something beyond are not only looking for signs that anything is there. They are looking for reciprocity: to be heard and to understand in return. That desire is relational. It is less about elegant cosmic laws and more about a sense of address.
Set against the possibility that the gap between humans and any larger reality is even greater than the gap between humans and ants, that wish can feel fragile. And yet, people keep reaching out. They talk, question, argue, interpret, revise. In that ongoing movement lies a stubborn faith that meaning might exist even when clarity does not.
Learning to listen in another register
The sensory world of the ant offers one last hint. Ants are not built to read printed words or listen to spoken sentences. They are superbly tuned to gradients of scent, the rhythm of antennal taps and tiny shifts in the strength of chemical paths. Intelligence, for them, lives in that medium.
Humans, by contrast, are driven by sight and language. Yet not everything important arrives as a neatly framed statement. Patterns reveal themselves over time: repeated chances to act generously, encounters that change the course of a life, sudden insights that reframe old pain, moments of beauty that interrupt routine. None of these prove anything in a courtroom sense. Still, they may be the only form of “reply” a finite creature is capable of receiving.
Studies of animal senses underline this idea. Many nocturnal species trade sharp detail for greater sensitivity, seeing less clearly but in much dimmer light. Others lean heavily on hearing or smell when vision is unreliable. No eye, ear or nose captures every aspect of the world. Perception is always partial, defined as much by what it cannot register as by what it can.
If that is true for the relationship between animals and their environments, it may also be true for the relationship between humans and whatever might lie beyond them. The answer, if there is one, may not match the format expected. It may arrive as a pattern, not a sentence.
Conclusions
Life between earthquake and whisper
At ground level, an ant feels vibrations and follows invisible lines of scent. High above, a human takes a step, unaware of the colonies that tremble. Between those two scales lies a question that continues to haunt human thought: what if our own lives are just as small inside a larger order we barely sense?
That question can unsettle. It can also widen the frame. If perception is always limited, then the absence of a clear spoken reply is not, by itself, proof that nothing is listening. It may be a sign that any possible reply does not fit the way humans expect communication to work.
What remains firmly within human reach is attention. It is possible to notice how actions ripple outward, to treat smaller lives as something more than background, and to stay open to the chance that meaning appears not as a thunderclap but as a quiet, repeating motif. In that space of watchfulness, existence continues: fragile, noisy, full of doubt, and perhaps already in contact with more than it can fully understand.
Sources
This article is based on widely available scientific work on ant biology, including compound eyes, pheromone communication and collective behaviour, as well as standard philosophical discussions of religious experience and questions about silence, meaning and transcendence.
General reference works and open-access reviews on insect vision, social insects and philosophy of religion were consulted to shape the overview, but no specific titles or links are required to follow the argument presented here.
A range of public educational materials on how animals perceive the world, and how humans interpret experiences they consider spiritual or religious, also informed the narrative structure and examples.
Appendix
Ant communication
Ant communication is the set of behaviours through which ants share information with one another, mainly using chemicals called pheromones, along with touch and, in some species, sound. These signals allow colonies to coordinate foraging, defence, nest building and brood care so effectively that the group can behave like a single, distributed organism.
Ant vision
Ant vision refers to the way ants use their compound eyes, and sometimes additional simple eyes, to perceive their surroundings. Their eyes provide a broad field of view and excellent sensitivity to movement and contrast, but limited sharpness, so fine details are often lost and distant shapes appear blurred.
Divine silence
Divine silence is the experience of seeking contact with a higher reality and not receiving a clear or recognisable reply. The idea captures the gap between a strong desire for communication and the absence of an obvious answer, without deciding in advance whether that absence reflects a truly silent universe or the limits of human ways of listening.
Pheromone trail
A pheromone trail is a chemical path laid down by ants and other social insects to mark routes to food, new nest sites or areas that should be avoided. The strength of the trail changes as more individuals follow or abandon it, allowing the group to build and revise efficient networks without any central planner.
Religious experience
Religious experience is a broad term for events in which people feel they encounter or are affected by a reality they regard as sacred, divine or ultimately meaningful. Such experiences can range from quiet shifts in perception to intense moments of awe or insight, and they raise questions about how to interpret them and how much weight they should carry in shaping a life.
Scale of perspective
Scale of perspective describes how the same event can look ordinary, overwhelming or insignificant depending on the size, power and mental equipment of the observer. A small human gesture can transform an ant’s environment, just as very large processes may be unfolding around humans that remain invisible or incomprehensible from a human point of view.
My Diary - Leonardo Cardillo 