https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmltIMPMeP0&ab_channel=JackSpaniard
“...when my bird was looking at my computer monitor, I thought 'woah, that bird has no idea what he's looking at'. And yet, what does the bird do, does he panic? No, he can't really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice. Yeah, he can kinda live...usually the bird's okay, even though he doesn't understand the world, and he can kinda learn what's safe and what's dangerous. So uh, that's where I've been living."
According to Terry's allegory, reality is represented as an intricately patterned screen, emitting artificial light in designs that are only interpretable to human beings. A bird encounters this screen, symbolizing an individual's interaction with reality. Despite the screen's complexity, the bird doesn't entangle itself in an attempt to understand it. Instead, it exists in harmony with its surroundings, singing its songs, flying, and living its life to the fullest within the bounds of its comprehension.
This metaphor embodies a fusion of philosophical perspectives - existentialism with its focus on individual agency and existence, phenomenology emphasizing the significance of personal experience, and pragmatic realism underscoring our capacity to understand only fragments of reality
Plato’s Cave
In Plato's cave, the shadows are terribly simplistic compared to the puppets casting them, and those puppets are even more simplistic than the real world up above; but the prisoners think the shadows are reality. In Terry's metaphor, the screen is incomprehensibly complex. It outputs artificial light in patterns and designs only understandable to human people. But the bird isn't tangled on this perceptual impasse. It just does the best it can, sings a few songs, and eventually flies away, living it's own life.
Plato's fundamental point is that reality has enough weak "soft spots" that we can prod at to re-discover some higher, "realer" reality, like through logic or geometry. In contrast, Terry's fundamental point is that reality is so complex that the best we can do is try to live in, of, and as part of it rather than to try and understand it completely.
Unlike Plato's allegory that invites us to penetrate reality's soft spots and seek a 'realer' truth, Terry's Allegory of the Bird asks us to acknowledge, accept, and find peace within our cognitive limitations. Terry's "allegory of the bird" speaks to us because we know it's true. We really don't know what we're doing. We might have some ideas, and maybe some damn good plans for the future, but we don't know for certain. The good news is that we all eventually make peace with our known unknowns, and our unknown unknowns.
what if the reality is so intricate that understanding it fully is beyond our reach?
The themes and ideas it explores certainly align with several well-established philosophical perspectives. It is, from my research, a unique or at least not widely known ‘allegory’ of reality - (i.e, there is no definite term to what Terry is describing, hence a unique allegory), having a mixture of several school of thoughts.
Existentialism