The Fly, the Bat, and the Worm

The Fly, the Bat, and the Worm is a didactic calca presented as a thought experiment about perception, communication, and shared structure.

Definition

The calca imagines three “protan” creatures that each possess only one sense: - a fly (all vision), - a bat (all hearing/echolocation), and - a worm (all touch).

Placed with an object—and then with a disguised trap—in a large cavern, each creature can discover different facts about the same thing through its own modality. To avoid being caught, they must cooperate. The key claim is that the only language they can reliably share is one of geometry and time: distances, shapes, proximities, and temporal relations. In this framing, complex mechanisms (gears, shafts, springs) become describable across senses only via measurable relations and sequences in space‑time.

A further implication drawn in the discussion is that human cognition functions, in effect, like cooperating “fly/bat/worm” subsystems: heterogeneous sensory processes are integrated by translating inputs into a common geometric‑temporal representation. This is offered as a post‑Sconic way to explain how a unified model of the world arises from disparate givens.

Context and Usage

• Within the maths, the calca is known as a traditional way to explain to fids the Sconic style of thinking about what minds can usefully address and how different modalities can converge on shared structure.
• During recent travel extramuros, an avout used this calca to converse with a Bazian driver at a mountain retreat. In the same period, observers related it to a separate topic: a geometric proof visible on an icosahedral craft was interpreted as a deliberate attempt to bypass language, appealing to universally graspable relations; see Adrakhonic Theorem.

Related Terms

• Calca — the teaching form in which this explanation is given.
• Avout — the mathic community that employs and transmits this calca.
• Adrakhonic Theorem — the canonical geometric result cited as a language‑independent emblem.
• Hylaean Theoric World — the realm of ideal forms toward which such geometric reasoning is directed in mathic teaching.

Notes

• The move from a harmless object to a trap introduces survival stakes, forcing convergence on the minimal shared lexicon (measurement and sequence) rather than sense‑specific descriptions.
• The calca’s “protan” creatures are idealized to strip away confounding overlaps of real senses. The point is not zoological analogy but the claim that geometry and time form the only universally translatable code among differing modalities.
• Some discussants characterize the use of a geometric proof as a public emblem as unsettling precisely because it presumes such common ground across minds that do not share language.