Exploring Unwelt Theory and Species Sensing Transcript: Speaker 1 We’ll be talking about Unwelt theory. This is the idea that every species has its own self-world, its own private and peculiar mode of sensing and being. The theory was first put forth in the 1900s by a theoretical biologist named Jacob von Ochskoll. (Time 0:00:46)
Explicación del concepto de Umwelt. Transcript: Speaker 1 At one point or another, we’ve all pondered some version of the what-is-it-like question. What-is-it-like-to-be-a-bird gliding over the world with the proverbial bird’s eye view? What-is-it-like-to-be-a-dog navigating a lush landscape of smell? 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 this question, of course. Half a century before him, and half a world away, a theoretical biologist named Jacob von Uchskull was wondering what it was like to be a tick. Von Uchskull was born in 1864 in what is now Estonia. As a budding young biologist, he cut his teeth conducting experiments on frogs in Germany and doing fieldwork abroad on squid and Naples and sea urchins in Tanzania. He’s 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’s impossible to categorize, and for some, its charms are hard to resist. Von Uchskull 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 sometimes translated, is what he called in German its whom-welt. Each bubble comprises all that an organism can sense and act upon. In some cases it’s not much. Yet to the organism that private world is THE world, it’s complete, the only world it can know and experience. An un-welt, he writes, is a quote, closed unit. Consider the tick. It’s a denizen of that meadow in the star of the monographs, the very first figure. The tick waits patiently on the branch of a tree. It doesn’t hear or see. Its whom-welt consists of just a few precious cues. Light, acid, heat, smoothness. The sensation of light draws the tick up to the branch. The smell of euteric 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 world of the tick is but a quote, 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, Vanukskull guides our attention to other creatures, to paramecia, and flies, to sea urchins and snails, to sticklebacks and scallops. (Time 0:01:54)
biología cognición conceptos definición
Teorías herederas del concepto de Umwelt. Transcript: Speaker 1 Many note a trace of unwelt theory in the ideas of Umberto Materana and his notion of autopoiesis, 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 unwelt theory and in activism. The notion that the world as we experience it is not out there, independent of us, but is something we bring forth from one moment to the next. (Time 0:07:54)
biología cognición conceptos teoría
Teoría de la interfaz perceptual. Transcript: Speaker 1 One notable recent error to Vanukskull’s ideas is the interface theory of perception, put forward by the vision scientist Donald Hoffman and collaborators. Its rise has been swift, and the buzz around it keeps swelling. The theory centers on a simple computing analogy. The ideas that we perceive and interact with reality as if through a kind of interface, much like the graphical interface on your laptop. In the 2015 paper, Hoffman and colleagues write, quote, a desktop interface makes it easy to use the computer, dot, dot, dot. 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 we need to do in the world. But they did not evolve to reveal the true structure of that world, absolutely not. If anything, the researchers note, perceptual interfaces quote, hide the truth from us. In their focus on evolution, and in other ways, interface theorists go beyond Vanukskull. They stress there is no good reason to believe that natural selection opts for perceptual systems that represent the world viritically, accurately. Not in bats, not in ticks, and not in humans. And they go much further in formalizing their theory, giving it computational teeth. (Time 0:08:25)
biología cognición teoría