Me, My Umwelt, and I
At one point or another, we’ve all pondered some version of the “what is it like” question. What is it like to be bird, gliding over the world with the proverbial bird’s eye view. What is like to be a dog, navigating a lush landscape of smells. Or a whale, operating on scales of space and time we can hardly fathom.
Many of us associate this question with a 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, titled “What is it like to be a bat?” But Nagel was not the first to ask it, of course. Half a century before him — and half a world away — a theoretical biologist named Jakob von Uexküll was wondering what it was like to be a tick.
Von Uexküll was born in 1864 in what is now Estonia. As a budding biologist, he cut his teeth conducting experiments on frogs in Germany and doing fieldwork abroad — on squid in Naples and sea urchins in Tanzania. He is best known, however — not for ingenious experiments or meticulous fieldwork — but for a short, whimsical treatise he published in 1934. Its title has been translated as ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men.’ And its subtitle: ‘A picture book of invisible worlds.’ It’s a mere 70 pages, and includes more than 50 illustrations. It is impossible to categorize. And, for some, its charms are impossible to resist.
Von Uexküll begins by asking us to imagine a blooming, buzzing meadow — full of butterflies, earthworms, field mice, and more. He invites us to blow a soap bubble around each of the creatures we see, to represent its private world. This private world — or “self-world” as it is sometimes translated — is what he called in German its umwelt.
Each bubble comprises all an organism can sense and act on. In some cases, it’s not much. Yet to the organism that private world is the world, it is complete, the only world it can know and experience. An umwelt, he writes, is a “closed unit.”
Consider the tick. It’s a denizen of that meadow and the star of the monograph’s first figure. The tick waits, patiently, on the branch of a tree. It doesn’t hear or see. Its umwelt consists of just a precious few cues: Light, acid, heat, smoothness. The sensation of light draws the tick up to the branch, the smell of butyric acid tells it when to drop on an animal below, the feeling of heat upon landing tells it to cling, and the smoothness of the skin tells it where, exactly, to burrow in. The universe of the tick is but a “scanty framework.”
The point is an entirely general one. “All animals, from the simplest to the most complex,” he writes, “are fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness.” As our stroll continues, von Uexküll guides our attention to other creatures. To paramecia and flies; sea urchins and snails; sticklebacks and scallops. We pause to consider honey bees and hunting dogs. We meet a rumpled duckling and a bear marking its territory. We are treated to the drama of jackdaw and the bathing suit it mistakes for an enemy. Through these encounters we learn about those “scanty frameworks” that various creatures possess. We learn that what is real to one species may be invisible to another; that what is most meaningful in some umwelts may be simply missing from others.
von Uexkül does not just tell us what these umwelts are like. He shows us — or tries, anyway, using inventive illustrations and sometimes photographic gimmickry. In one series of figures, a first photograph shows a village scene as we might experience it ourselves; the next shows the same scene photographed through a screen, to simulate the cruder visual resolution that others species experience. He then goes another step, photographing the photograph through a screen, rendering the village that much as coarser. As fly might see it, or a mollusk, he explains.
There’s another important species in von Uexkull’s meadow: us. Are we alone able see the world as it really is, free of the distortions of that enclosing bubble? Do we in some sense live — not in our own private umwelt — but in the world as it really is? Not so, says von Uexkull. In fact, he hopes our meadow stroll will lead us to the opposite conclusion, to “recognize the soap bubble which encloses each of us as well.”
This may be von Uexkull’s most radical suggestion of all. The earth-rattling force of Darwin’s theory of natural selection becomes clearest when we turn it back on ourselves, when we recognize our own evolved nature. In a similar way, the power of von Uexkull’s notion of the umwelt resonates most deeply when we recognize that applies equally to us.
Which is not say that each of us is consigned to an umwelt entire unto ourself. Von Uexküll notes that our soap bubbles manage to “intersect each other smoothly.” But it is to say our species does not somehow enjoy privileged access to the world as it really it is. “There is no space independent of subjects.” He writes: “If we still cling to the fiction of an all-encompassing universal space, we do so only because this conventional fable facilitates mutual communication.”
Understandably, ideas like this can sometimes make scientists and philosophers a little squirmy. And it is certainly tempting to take issue with some formulations — or it would be, if they weren’t presented in such a disarming way.
In the time since Von Uexküll published his “little monograph,” his ideas have been biding time on the margins — on the outskirts of biology and cognitive science, of philosophy and robotics, even of literary theory. But they’ve never lost their relevance. And, over the past few decades, they have arguably become more influential than ever.
Many note a trace of umwelt theory in the ideas of Humberto Maturana, and his notion of autopoeisis, or in the thought of J.J. Gibson and his ideas about affordances. Some see it in contemporary theories of niche construction — the idea that organisms both construct and adapt to worlds of their own making. Others detect a family resemblance between umwelt theory and enactivism — the notion that world as we experience is not out there, independent of us, but is something we bring forth from one moment to the next.
One notable recent heir to von Uexküll’s ideas is the interface theory of perception, put forward by the vision scientist Donald Hoffmann and his collaborators. Its rise has been swift, and the buzz around it is still swelling. The theory centers on a simple computing analogy. The idea is that we perceive and interact with reality as if through a kind of interface, much like the graphical interface on your laptop.
In their 2015 paper, Hoffman and colleagues write: “A desktop interface makes it easy to use the computer… A desktop interface does not make it easy to know the true structure of a computer — its transistors, circuits, voltages, magnetic fields, firmware, and software.” In the same way, they argue, our perceptual systems evolved to allow us to easily do what need to do in the world. They did not evolve to reveal the true structure of that world — absolutely not. If anything, the researchers note, perceptual interfaces “hide” the truth from us.
In their focus on evolution, interface theorists go beyond Von Uexküll. They stress that there is no good reason to believe that natural selection opts for perceptual systems that represent the world veridically — not in bats, not in ticks, and not in humans. And they go much further in formalizing their theory, giving it computational teeth.
It’s hard to know what von Uexküll might have thought of such extensions. He may have struggled to grasp the “interface” analogy, steeped as it in what would have been in unfamiliar technology. Who knows, even if he understood it, he may have still favored his more child-like analogy of soap bubbles.
Child-like seems like a fitting word to describe von Uexküll’s treatise. Not only because of the picture book format, but also because his words exude wonder on every page. The world is a meadow, he seems to urge us. Go forth and frolic. This child-like quality, this unabashed embrace of wonder, may be part of the reason von Uexkull’s work lingered on the margins for so long. But it may also be the reason it endures.
– Kensy Cooperrider
Note: This post originally appeared in audio format on the ‘Many Minds’ podcast (@ManyMindsPod). You can listen to the episode here.
