- Jul 2024
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paddyleflufy.substack.com paddyleflufy.substack.com
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All around you as you read this essay, billions of molecules are chaotically bouncing into each other as they move at hundreds of metres per second
for - perspectival knowing - umwelt - perspectival knowing
perspectival knowing - Again, this may be considered "true" from one perspective, but not recognized from another - What meaning does it have to someone whose worldview is highly religious? - What meaning does it have to a tick, whose umwelt doesn't even allow it to recognize human word symbols in any meaningful way?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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26:30 Brings up progress traps of this new technology
26:48
question How do we shift our (human being's) relationship with the rest of nature
27:00
metaphor - interspecies communications - AI can be compared to a new scientific instrument that extends our ability to see - We may discover that humanity is not the center of the universe
32:54
Question - Dr Doolittle question - Will we be able to talk to the animals? - Wittgenstein said no - Human Umwelt is different from others - but it may very well happen
34:54
species have culture - Marine mammals enact behavior similar to humans
- Unknown unknowns will likely move to known unknowns and to some known knowns
36:29
citizen science bioacoustic projects - audio moth - sound invisible to humans - ultrasonic sound - intrasonic sound - example - Amazonian river turtles have been found to have hundreds of unique vocalizations to call their baby turtles to safety out in the ocean
41:56
ocean habitat for whales - they can communicate across the entire ocean of the earth - They tell of a story of a whale in Bermuda can communicate with a whale in Ireland
43:00
progress trap - AI for interspecies communications - examples - examples - poachers or eco tourism can misuse
44:08
progress trap - AI for interspecies communications - policy
45:16
whale protection technology - Kim Davies - University of New Brunswick - aquatic drones - drones triangulate whales - ships must not get near 1,000 km of whales to avoid collision - Canadian government fines are up to 250,000 dollars for violating
50:35
environmental regulation - overhaul for the next century - instead of - treatment, we now have the data tools for - prevention
56:40 - ecological relationship - pollinators and plants have co-evolved
1:00:26
AI for interspecies communication - example - human cultural evolution controlling evolution of life on earth
Tags
- progress trap - AI applied to interspecies communications
- ecological relationships - pollinators and plants co-evolved
- interspecies communication - umwelt
- - whale communication - span the entire ocean
- whale protection - bioacoustic and drones
- AI for interspecies communication - example - human cultural evolution controlling evolution of life on earth
- citizen science bioacoustics
- metaphor - interspecies communication - AI is like a new scientific instrument
- progress trap - AI for interspecies communications - examples - poachers - ecotourism
- environmental overhaul - treatment to prevention
- question - How do we shift our relationship with the rest of nature? - ESP research objective
- progress trap - AI for interspecies communications - policy
Annotators
URL
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- May 2024
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Ausführliches Interview mit dem bisherigen UN-Berichterstatter für Menschenrechte und Umwelt David Boyd. Das von der UN festgeschriebene Recht auf eine saubere Umwelt müsse gegen ein Wirtschaftssystem durchgesetzt werden, das auf der Ausbeutung von Mensch und Natur basiert, und das von mächtigen Eliten aufrecht erhalten wird. Regierungen und Öffentlichkeit seien sich der Dramatik der Umweltsituation nicht bewusst. Boyd erwartet, dass in wenigen Jahren Prozesse gegen viele der aktuellen Regierungen geführt werden. würden. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/07/un-expert-human-rights-climate-crisis-economy
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- Jan 2024
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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sometimes people ask me uh is it possible that we're living in a simulation that all this is you know that reality isn't what we and and if you think about it it's not just 00:52:31 possible it's guaranteed
for - adjacency - sensory bubble - umwelt - living in a simulation - Daisetz Suzuki - elbow doesn't bend backwards - quote - Michael Levin - illusion
adjacency - between - sensory bubble - umwelt - living in a simulation - Daisetz Suzuki - the elbow does not bend backwards - adjacency statement - In the Tibetan Buddhist epistemology, the illusory body training is to experience both one's body and reality as an illusion in the sense that nothing is static and fixed - From this perspective, we are all temporary states of convergence of the recirculating elements of emptiness - Daisetz Suzuki, the enlightened Japanese Zen monk who is credited to be one of the ones who brought Zen to the West said that when he experienced Kensho, he could suddenly understand the puzzling koan "The elbow does not bend backwards" with great clarity. - Form is a concentration and temporary consolidation of emptiness, the limitations inherent in any form does not denigrate is absolute origins from unlimited emptiness - The Heart Sutra expresses the equivalence of form and emptiness, finite and infinite. - In Deep Humanity, we have a saying: - To be or not to be - that is the question - To be AND not to be - that is the answer
- Quote: Michael Levin
- Sometimes people ask me
"is it possible that we're living in a simulation?
- and and if you think about it it's not just possible it's guaranteed.
- There's no other way it could possibly be
- If you think about what is the opposite of that
- the opposite of that is that you somehow have a physically embodied cognitive structure that
- is able to,
- is not limited in its sensory perceptions
- is not limited in the amount of memory and computations
- the opposite of that is that you somehow have a physically embodied cognitive structure that
- All of us are limited beings
- All of us evolved under constraints of
- time
- energy and
- everything else -We see a tiny, little, narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum
- We have a few other things
- like chemical senses of things that are right there on your tongue and
- on your fingers and so on
- we have a little bit of memory
- we have this wet squishy substrate
- that's very error prone and
- needs to be constantly maintained
- and all our memories have to be the actively rewritten
- We were evolved under specific pressures under those conditions
- Who could possibly think that that we are not living in some sort of very specific representation of reality
- that is limited in many ways
- That's not to say
- it isn't adaptive and that
- Donald Hoffman would say that in many ways it is completely wrong
- I I think there's probably some truth to that
- but in other ways I think the the big lesson from all this is that
- we are all a brain and a vat
- Of course we are a brain sitting inside this thing that gives us various stimuli
- We try to make the best sense of it that we can and creatures will adapt to
- This is why you can do
- sensory substitution and
- sensory augmentation and why
- you can have neurons in the dish that play Pong
- but these systems will try to make
sense of whatever world they're given
- in whatever configuration they have and we do the same
- So yeah absolutely it's an illusion
- but it's not an illusion in the sense that there is some other way to have perfect direct perception of some underlying reality
- When we say it's an illusion or a simulation
- It just acknowledges the fact that we are finite limited beings
- whose job it is to make the best sense we can
- using the hardware that we have
- of what's been going on up until now and what we predict is going to be going on
- I don't know of another story that could possibly make sense
- Sometimes people ask me
"is it possible that we're living in a simulation?
- Quote: Michael Levin
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- Sep 2023
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- for: symbiocene, ecozoic, ecocivilization, eco-civilization, animal communication, inter-species communication, Azi Raskin, Earth Species Project, umwelt
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summary
- Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
- https://www.earthspecies.org/
- cofounder of https://www.humanetech.com/
- on two main themes:
- how AI is being used to decode language communication of many different plant and animal species, including inter-fauna, inter-flora and fauna-flora cross communication
- how AI used to study human languages has detected a universal meaning shape between all languages.
- Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
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reference
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www.semanticscholar.org www.semanticscholar.org
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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we, as humans, have very limited capacity and finely-honed ability to see intelligence in medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds through three-dimensional space. So we see other primates and we see crows and we see dolphins, 00:03:34 and we have some ability to recognize intelligence. But we really are very bad at recognizing intelligence in unconventional embodiments where our basic expectations strain against this idea that there could be intelligence in something extremely small or extremely large.
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for: example, example - human umwelt
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example: human umwelt
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Tags
Annotators
URL
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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ou certainly have a light cone that does not belong to any of your pieces
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for: individual / collective gestalt, Deep Humanity, superorganism, multi-level superorganism, major evolutionary transition, MET, cognitive light cone, umwelt
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paraphrase
- a human being certainly has a light cone that does not belong to any of its pieces (ie cells)
- at the conscious level of a human being, we have
- goals
- preferences
- hopes
- dreams
- narratives
- humans occupy spaces that do not belong to our individual cells, tissues or organs
- those smaller parts work in
- physiological space
- transcriptional space
- biomolecular space
- those smaller parts work in
- When we were an embryo we worked in morphogenetic space
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comment
- Since MET implies that these smaller structures of which we are constituted like
- cells and
- sub-cellular structures like mitochondria
- were descended from individual organisms long ago in deep history, those contemporary proxies are occupying their own umwelt
- Since MET implies that these smaller structures of which we are constituted like
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- Aug 2023
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pupil shape is a powerful indicator of what role an animal plays in its ecosystem
- for: umwelt, symbiocene, perspectival knowing
- comment
- the experience of reality of other living beings
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- Jan 2023
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reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
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this chart was of no use to millions of blind people
!- data inaccessibility : framing - this can be framed as a challenge in addressing Perspectival knowing and situatedness, and can involve human Umwelt
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Someone with a cognitive impairment, for example, might benefit greatly from visuals rather than paragraphs of text, whilst for screen readers user paragraphs of text are the more accessible option.
!- different handicaps : how to optimise - indyweb solution - long tail app development. Not the responsibility of the information provider, but the Indyvidual who owns their own indyhub selects the apps that are appropriate to their situatedness. - If their perspective is a visually impaired person, then apps that compensate for that are selected, if their impairment is some other sensory or cognitive modality, then select apps appropriate to that
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- Oct 2022
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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i want you to imagine two other sentient beings seeing that rose and again this uh reflects an analogy that john gave us earlier in the day imagine that there's a bee looking at that rose 00:38:03 bees see um colors in the infrared and the ultraviolet spectrum they see all kinds of colors in that rose that we can't even see it probably looks speckled and striped to them in all kinds of really cool ways and they see it through 00:38:16 compound eyes my dog has got far less color sensitivity than we do and he probably sees the rose in a shade of gray now if we were to ask the question which of the three of us the bee 00:38:29 the dog or me sees the rose correctly sees it as it is does we understand immediately that that's a stupid question the only thing we can talk about is the 00:38:42 rose as it shows up for a human being the rose as it shows up for a bee the rose as it shows up for a dog but if you were to ask oh yeah yeah yeah but what does the rose look like in itself what does the rose itself look like 00:38:56 that is a really stupid question and that's what ultimate naturelessness is there is no way that things just are there are only ways that things show up for different kinds of sensory and 00:39:10 cognitive consciousness and that is ultimate naturelessness
L- definition : third naturelessness - the ultimate naturelessness - very aligned to umwelt - any object appears a specific way relative to a specific living being
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the reason is that a perception 00:10:38 is kind of perceptual in structure and the buddhist world encodes this by arguing that the internal um sense the the manus venana is a sense faculty just like external faculties 00:10:52 and so just as our external faculties present us with a world that just seems to us even though we know it's not to be just as it is that we see it just as it is 00:11:03 it's tempting to think that we've got this apparent object distinct from our sensory apprehension of it but is but an object that's presented by a completely veritable process 00:11:15 because as i say perception just feels like it presents the world to us as it is i look at a red apple and i think damn i know exactly what that apple smells like looks like tastes like and 00:11:27 feels like forgetting that all i have is the apple as it's mediated by the peculiar perceptual system that i have and by all of the conceptual resources through which i filtered my perception 00:11:41 so in the same way a perception or introspective awareness just feels like it presents our own cognitive affective and perceptual states to us just as they are 00:11:53 independent of that appreceptive system and those conceptual categories so just as external perception gives us the illusion that we're just detectors of the world as it is inner perception can give us the illusion that we are just 00:12:06 detectors of our inner um our inner world just as it is so even when we remind ourselves as i'm reminding you right now of this 00:12:18 extremely complex mediation of our perceptual encounter with external objects we find ourselves in constantly experiencing our own experience as though 00:12:31 we've got the world just as it is and then we sometimes say okay maybe we're not getting the world just as it is but at least i'm getting my sensory experiences just as they are the apple might not be red but the redness i 00:12:42 experience is exactly the redness that i think i experience the sweetness that i introspect must be the sweetness just as it is and so forth so even if we give up for a moment and it's hard to give it up 00:12:54 for more than that the notion of immediacy with regard to external perception we often retreat to thinking that that's mediated but my awareness of my own inner episodes is the immediate 00:13:06 awareness that mediates my knowledge of the external world and i think that in the sense of that perception that sense of immediacy is even greater it's really hard for us to be convinced that our inner experience 00:13:20 could possibly be deceptive we seem to think that if i think that i believe something i must believe it if i think that i'm feeling something i must be feeling it and that feeling and that believing grab my inner 00:13:33 reality just as it is and so part of the problem that arises is that the mediation of our introspective awareness by our introspective faculty becomes 00:13:46 cognitively invisible to us just as what i'm seeing the world my visual faculty is invisible and it just delivers a visible world to me and i have to really think to to understand 00:13:58 what my own visual faculty visual organ and visual consciousness are contributing i think i experience my introspective faculty as just giving me inner objects and i have to think and remind myself 00:14:11 that actually my inner sense faculty is also a fallible instrument and that i may be misusing that instrument or that instrument might be intrinsically deceptive and that's a hard thing to get one's mind around 00:14:25 as a consequence we've become seduced by this idea that even if our knowledge of some things is mediated that mediation can't go all the way down we get seduced by the idea that there's got to be a 00:14:38 basic foundational level of experience to which we can have some kind of immediate access and to which when we know it we know it absolutely veritically in the theory of knowledge that leads us to foundationalism in the 00:14:51 philosophy of mind it leads us to sense datum theory um and i find that in a lot of buddhist situations a lot of buddhist practitioners take it to be this idea of an infallibility of an immediate kind of 00:15:03 experience if i'm sitting on the cushion just right so with all of that in play um i want to move to exercising that myth of the given that i've been characterizing 00:15:16 and to show that buddhist philosophy offers us powerful ways of doing that and i'm going to begin by talking about first person knowledge through the lens of the madhyamaka tradition
Jay emphasizes the compelling sense of this allure of immediacy. We believe that our perceptual and our introspective faculties give us an infallible representation of reality, and never question that it could be fallible.
This is very much aligned with the research on Umwelt by Jakob Von Uexkull.
Aperception, the introspection and awareness of our inner space is just as alluring.
So in summary: perception gives us the feeling that we are sensing the way the external world actually is and aperception gives us the feeling that we are aware of the inner world as it is. However, both are relative, the first to our peculiar sense faculties and the second to our linguistic and conceptual modeling of reality. Both are specific filters that create the specific situated interpretation of reality as a human being.
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- Jul 2022
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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i was particularly struck by the fact that barry didn't say the mind is this this and that okay barry said well the mind is many things 01:19:18 uh look there's this and this this and this and there's a sort of layers also in some sense in which we can talk about it or or have some understanding partial media 01:19:30 understanding about it some wisdom about it and this layering i find it it's uh absolutely brilliant from my perspective 01:19:43 uh because it it dissolves the wrong question which is what is the mind period what is the thing which is the mind here is the thing which is mine uh let's just 01:19:55 define it characterize it and understand what it is that's a wrong that's a wrong way of thinking about it it's when we say when we think about our mind of course we think something you you unite somehow 01:20:09 it's the set of processes that happen into me and it's about my thinking my emotions but it's not one thing it's a complicated layer there's many layers of discussion possible about 01:20:21 that i don't want to enter into the specific but i found this fascinating and let me go to time immediately because uh it's it's deeply related i got the book of time which is a um 01:20:34 the audio of time in which i carlo this carlo is very timely because we're also kind of running low on time absolutely absolutely 01:20:46 and and and in the book i sort of uh try to collect everything we have learned about time from science from special activity from generative statistical mechanics from other pieces and and what we 01:21:00 tentatively uh learn about time with quantum gravity which is my uh specific field once again you have to sort of uh put your hands on the notion of time and the main message of the book 01:21:12 in fact the single message of the book is that the question of what is time is a wrong question because when we think about time we think about the single thing okay we think we have a totally clear idea about time time is a single thing 01:21:25 that flows from the past to the future and the past influence the president the president of the future in the present this is how things are the reality of the present entire universe is a real state in that and we learn from science that this way 01:21:37 of viewing times is wrong it's factually wrong okay it's not true that uh we all proceed in in in together from 01:21:48 moment a to moment b and the amount lapse amount of time lapses between a and b is the same for everybody and so on and forth because we learned from from experiences especially activity generativity statistical mechanics and 01:22:01 other things so the way to think about time is that it's a very layered thing but with this thing we call time is made by layers um conceptually and when we look at larger 01:22:14 domain the one of our usual experience some layers are lost so uh some aspects some some properties of what we call time are only good 01:22:25 uh are only appropriate for describing the temporal experience we have if we don't move too fast it doesn't look too uh to to to too far away if you don't look at the atoms too in detail as a single 01:22:38 degrees of freedom and so on so forth so the notion of time opens up in a in a in a set of layers which are become increasingly 01:22:53 uh general only if you go down to the bottom level um some aspect of time like the universality of time uh uh only makes sense if if we don't go too 01:23:06 fast velocities for instance um so this is a similarity and that's why the the opening up of what the mind is into layers seems to be uh 01:23:19 the right direction to go right when if if i ask uh does a cat has a mind or does a fly has a mind it seems to me that the only answer is uh to get out of the idea that the 01:23:31 answer is either yes or no i mean i i suppose that certainly a cat has a certain you know a sleepy feeling in the morning and the moment of 01:23:43 joy when he sees his fellow cats but i suppose a cat doesn't go through a complicated intellectual game of trying to understanding what is reality and debating about that so there is some aspect in common uh either not break up 01:23:56 this this notion in in pieces once again uh i mean the the topic is what is real uh 01:24:08 if we start by saying time is real it's a beautiful chapter why you cannot say that time is an intrinsic existence uh we just get it wrong if we think well then atoms are real or the mind is real 01:24:21 all these answers we got it wrong we can say that things are real in a uh in a conventional sense within a context within a within a um 01:24:37 and and then we when we try to realize what you mean by uh something is real this is certainly real in a conventional sense but we realize that um reality the reality of this object 01:24:49 itself it gets sort of broken up into interdependence between this object and else and its different layers 01:25:02 and and that's the reality that as a scientist i can deal with not the ultimate reality the the conventional reality of course conventional reality is real as uh perry 01:25:15 was saying this is not a negation of reality uh it's a it's a it it's a freedom from the idea of the ultimate reality uh 01:25:27 the ultimate uh sort of intrinsic inherent reality being there on which in terms of which building progress
Carlo resonates with Barry's layered explanation of mind from the Buddhist perspective. The mind is not some simplistic entity. Carlo wrote a book on time and he applied this same layered thinking. Time is different in different circumstances. It acts one way at the quantum level, another at the microscopic, another at our human level, and another at the galactic level.
In a sense, we tend to make the same type of category errors whether it is our experience of time, space or experience in general. We overgeneralize from an anthropomorphic perspective. A large part of Jay L. Garfield's argument of cognitive illusions and immediacy of experience rests on this fact.
https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world
Opaque mechanisms operate in both our sense organs and our mental machinery to give us this illusory feeling of immediacy of the sensed or cognized object.
Uexkull's umwelt experiments on the snail as explained by Cummins are consistent with Carlo's perspective on time.
https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FG_0jJfliUvQ%2F&group=world
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for example i'm talking so my primary mind now is going 01:14:37 to be an auditory mind okay and then there's going to be a whole constellation of next secondary ones which are basically positive and negative or harmful uh positive non-harmful and harmful uh 01:14:51 qualities or attributes or emotions or thoughts or attitudes and then the next moment i'm looking at my screen so i have a visual mind and the constellation will change you know some of those 01:15:04 positive and negative qualities like i'm feeling a little sleepy or i'm very alert or i'm feeling jealous or i'm feeling very happy and connected you know with this 01:15:16 conversation those would be part of the secondary minds and then you know you have this infinite continuum everyone every living being every as you rightfully said sentient beings a living 01:15:26 being with a mind carlo um has um its own mental continuum um so it involves it's a big picture of mind it involves you know our 01:15:40 our thinking it involves our intellect it involves our heart feelings emotions uh and it involves those deeper levels in that sixth primary mind mental consciousness such as intuition and 01:15:53 deeper minds
Barry's explanation surfaces an association in my own mind - the Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity definition of sensory, affective and cognitive bubbles as sensory, affective and cognitive constraints of consciousness. It also brings up the association with Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt concept, which defines the sensory environment of an individual belonging to a species.
https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FG_0jJfliUvQ%2F&group=world
and Jay L. Garfield's talk on cognitive illusions and Buddhist philosophical concept of immediacy of experience
https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world
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embodied cognitive science has been greatly helped by an article written last year by elmo felton mined after ook school a foray into the world of ecological psychologists and an 00:23:44 activist this shows you how this work from the 1920s appears to contemporary embodied cognitive scientists and we're going to have the good luck that elmo will join us in class so we should have a very 00:23:58 productive discussion about the very strange world of jakob von ogsku
Elmo Felton wrote a recent paper about Uexkull and the umwelt in the field of ecological psychology.
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e's trying to begin to find the vocabulary to elaborate how we can speak of meaningful 00:17:53 being in the world without a subject there is no meaning his notion of the umvelt or the world as it arises for a specifically embodied organism 00:18:07 is not the same thing as environment he tries to make this distinction clear it's not entirely successful but here you can see he distinguishes on the left between what we might think of the environment of a honeybee which is a 00:18:20 field of flowers and on the right he's tried to draw the umvelt of the the field of flowers from i'm going to use this word from the point of view of the bee now it's unfortunate to have to use 00:18:33 visual metaphors there that's our language that's the way we talk about these things the processes are much more generic but we will inevitably use the language of vision when we're talking about such 00:18:44 things so he's tried fancifully to draw a meaningful umvelt as it might appear to a be we keep falling into this visual metaphor when we're when we talk about um subjectivities 00:18:59 we keep coming back to the notion of seeing which is most unfortunate when we discuss the umwelt you shouldn't think of something which the b see
With the umwelt, Uexkull surfaces that meaning for an organism is depending on the embodiment, the perceptual and cognitive machinery of the organism.
Each species of organisms experiences meaning in a way unique to that species.
As a digression, each individual of a species experiences meaning uniquely as a function of the species it is a part of, as well as the unique lifeworld of events.
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the task of biology consists in expanding in two directions the results of cancer investigations by considering the part played by our body and especially by our sense organs 00:04:47 and central nervous system you can see the basic parameters of what we now call cognitive science are coming into being here and by studying the relation of other subjects to objects 00:04:59 it's the subject that kant wants to take seriously that notion is still very undefined and notice here the term animal other subjects so the 00:05:10 animal is a subject here he's trying to take a stance that is not that doesn't traffic in human exceptionalism that takes the embodied being seriously and for him that means something that's 00:05:23 straightforwardly an animal a dog a cat a scientist a limpet and he's going to consider them all with much the same theoretical vocabulary he's pitching in here in 1926
Uexkull expands Kant's agenda and takes it in the direction of the body, and especially the animal body as playing a major role in knowing about the world. He downplays human exceptionalism by referring to the animal body, not the human body.
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we need to understand what the tradition is that he is feeding from and how what his orientation is he is 00:01:21 taking his own work to be an extension of the work of immanuel kant now if you have not noticed anything in the history of philosophy of mind please 00:01:33 notice descartes and kant those are the two principal landmarks so many others but kant had died at the very start of the 19th century kant was working within a 00:01:46 physical framework that was newtonian in which space and time are simply blocks containers within which things unfold mechanistically that was the metaphysics available to 00:02:00 kant was asking with that metaphysics how do we come to know anything now he had the cogito of descartes very much on his mind but also the the empiricists 00:02:14 concerns with the role of the senses following the tradition of hume and kant attempted to resolve this by noting that there were some things that could not be learned from the world that had 00:02:27 to be in place before any knowledge of the world can happen at all he called these the synthetic a prioris those things that well nothing forces the manas but we can't begin to make 00:02:38 sense of the notion of knowledge without prior notions of time and space and causality this is a difficult position to occupy and can't argumentation was developed in very many ways and gave rise to very many 00:02:53 different kinds of science thereafter for the thing in itself this shell is not knowable rather i encountered a phenomenon of the shell the phenomenon of the shell 00:03:11 through mediated through the senses and the body and i can never thus get to the shell itself this is of course the paradox underlying all representational theories 00:03:22 of perception which is that they seem to leave you estranged from the world and not in contact with the world all knowledge seem to be mediated through the sensors so it need you need 00:03:34 to bootstrap knowledge with these synthetic api ras for accounts this is immanuel kant dies at the start of the 19th century and then about 00:03:45 1870 something like scientific psychology starts to emerge and there's a wide variety of approaches they're drawing among other things from kant but they're not following one 00:03:58 unified agenda funux comes in here and he sees himself as taking kant seriously and he's going to develop in his context in the 1920s and 1930s 00:04:10 the notion of a synthetic a priori changes now instead of the physicalist model of time and space and as containers that we have with kant the body is the ultimate synthetic a 00:04:22 priori for von neux cool epistemology or how a being comes to know the world will only be ever understood through careful attention to the structures of and processes of the body
Uexkull's work, and formulation of the Umwelt must be contextualized in his predecessor Kant's ontological framing to be understood.
Based on the Newtonian mechanistic view of the world, Kant postulated that there must be some knowledge that must be known about the world prior to a (human) being being born into the world and called this synthetic apriori knowledge.....namely time, space and causality, the things that a Newtonian, mechanistic worldview assumes at the outset.
Since any object of the world can only be known through the 5 senses, we are estranged from reality, and there must be some knowledge we must have prior to sensing the world that helps us make sense of it.
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you are probably somewhat unfamiliar with the term biosemiotics is not in widespread use um and but it represents a very very 00:00:17 important reference point when we come to theories of embodied cognition the founder of biosemiotics is typically held to be jacob von xcool 00:00:29 biosemiotics is a field within the broader domain of semiotics which considers the manner in which meaning arises through various forms of mediation such as signs indices indexes 00:00:42 symbols and the like
Title: Introduction to Umwelt theory and Biosemiotics Author
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- Jun 2022
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There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters.
This is a profound statement that needs to be fully explored. This touches upon the theory of Charles Saunders Peirce and his Semiotics, as well as Jakob Von Uexkull and his Umwelt theory. Information becomes meaningful within an evolutionary framing of fitness.
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the thing is about humans is that this this stuff generalized the group stuff kind of generalizes from individual relational stuff like it's it's a you look at codependent relationships 00:24:00 one-on-one you start to see similar dynamics you know like you start to it's just have you thought about it the individual like the individual uh uh illusion level and how those basic first principles have reasoning for 00:24:13 first principles here you know yeah you're upset correct so so it's actually it's like fractal quality to it right so you see illusion in in in just between two people or small groups
In summary, the collective illusions principle applies at the level of two people all the way up to nations.
What we know about a person thinks and feels and what the other person actually thinks and feels are two entirely different things.
This harkens back to Uexkull and Husserl and Umwelt and Lebenswelt respectively.
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- May 2022
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www.usmcu.edu www.usmcu.edu
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Humanity’s COG is assessed as its deep frames, prevalent and dominant worldviews that influence governance decisions across the public and private sectors (figure 3). Simply put, CEC presents a new type of threat—a Frankenstein-like killing and destruction phenomenon—that humanity struggles to conceive or perceive.
It would benefit the description by including the umwelt in the perception lens and cognitive biases and cognitive constructions in the cognitive lens.
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The hyperthreat’s center of gravity (COG), the key characteristic that provides its power, is its freedom of movement, which is enabled by its hyperobject-like invisibility and unknowability and by human hesitancy to respond. Human activity that fuels the hyperthreat is often legal, has social license, and is understood as legitimate business or security activity; its contribution to slow violence is often obscured
Invisibility is a key characteristic of hyperthreats: we can't fight the enemy we don't perceive. We have not evolved the human sensory apparatus to make it visible. Our uuwelt (Uexkull) is not tuned to pick up and physiologically warn us about hyperthreats such as the tiny, invisible molecules of carbon dioxide or methane that we are spewing out everywhere. We are also not armed with default cognitive tools to make undeniable sense of it.
The "hyperthreat" is a useful meta-level construct because it allows us to tie together many fragments and make sense of it as symptoms of a higher level causal agent. Use of the word "intentional" seem to give hyperthreats a superorganism-like living quality.
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- Nov 2021
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www.annualreviews.org www.annualreviews.org
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Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance and importance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitive shortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and responding to climate change (152), including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physically remote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview (153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangible threat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does not present itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events. Where strong concern does exist, this tends to be linked to care for others (154) combined with knowledge about the causes and possible consequences of climate change (155).
This is indeed a problematic feature of human evolution. It has given rise to what Timothy Morton refers to as "hyperobjects", objects of such vastness in space and time that it defeats human mechanisms of perception at local scale: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects https://hyp.is/xROjpD_jEey4a6-Urbh4_Q/www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic
This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way within the context of Deep Humanity open source praxis BEing journeys.
As in the New Yorker interview with Morton, we can take Deep Humanity participants on BEing journeys, walkabouts to identify hyperobjects.
Hyperobjects are also cognitive and highly abstract in nature. This is a clue to another idea that could be enlightening to understanding the problematic context of appreciating hyperobjects such as climate change, and that is the idea of Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt:
"Uexküll was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). He argued that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, 'self-in-world' subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as surrounding-world,[9] phenomenal world,[10] self-world,[10] environment[11] - lit. German environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "Umgebung" which would be the living being's surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the human observer. Umwelt may thus be defined as the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject. By studying how the senses of various organisms like ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish and sea worms work, he was able to build theories of how they experience the world. Because all organisms perceive and react to sensory data as signs, Uexküll argued that they were to be considered as living subjects. This argument was the basis for his biological theory in which the characteristics of biological existence ("life") could not simply be described as a sum of its non-organic parts, but had to be described as subject and a part of a sign system.
The biosemiotic turn in Jakob von Uexküll's analysis occurs in his discussion of the animal's relationship with its environment. The Umwelt is for him an environment-world which is (according to Giorgio Agamben), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,
"...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."[12]
Thus, for the tick, the Umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairiness of mammals." ( From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll)
The human umwelt limits us to a relatively small range of sensed signs. CO2 particles is not one of them. We rely on scientific narratives but these are far removed from direct sensing, into the field of conceptualization and abstraction. We have evolved to respond to danger that is sensed, less so to danger that is conceptualized.
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- Aug 2018
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www.holzbau-deutschland.de www.holzbau-deutschland.de
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keiner will der Dumme sein, der sich bescheiden zurückhält,
nicht nur in der klassischen Philosophie vom guten Leben (Ethik) galt diese Bescheidenheit als Ideal und beste Voraussetzung zum Glücklichsein. warum dies heute als dumm gilt? weil die auf stetigen Konsum/ scheinbare Bedürfnisbefriedigung und scheinbare Bequemlichkeit programmierte Masse der Menschen den inneliegenden Widerspruch nicht sieht: dass nur die Emanzipation von den scheinbaren Bedürfnissen und die persönliche Besinnung auf ein "Minimum" (so wenig ist dies nämlich gar nicht, angesichts des heutigen, global-regional-lokalen Status Quo) des guten Lebens: Wohnen, Essen, Trinken, gute Luft, gutes Wasser, schöne Umgebung, usw. Grundlage für ein nachhaltig gutes Leben der heutigen und künftigen Menschen sein kann. …
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