Jakob von Uexküll and the Umwelt

With wonder, I have stumbled upon the work of Jakob von Uexküll, who died in 1944.  His work is hard to find, out of print or never even translated into English.  One article is available (I have scanned it in below.  Enjoy!).  It is a translation of a 1934 original, and it appeared in the obscure journal Semiotica in 1992, almost 60 years later!  It is called “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds”, and my copy tells me that it was originally published in English in “Instinctive Behavior”, trans by Claire H. Schiller in 1957.  It is the most charming academic article I have ever come across.  The discussion is helped along by no less than 53 figures, most of which are slightly fanciful attempts to depict the subjective experience of non-human animals, ranging from the humble paramecium up to the dog chasing a stick.  Each of these is an Umwelt, and they are amazingly close to my notion of the P-world!  In fact, von Uexküll even calls them “phenomenal worlds” that arise from the unification of a “perceptual world” and an “effector world”, or from the unification of perception and action.  How good is that!

But it gets better.  He pegs and discusses the subject/object distinction in many places.  He produces an early cybernetic model showing the reciprocal relations between subjective experience and environment, and says “the subject and the object are dovetailed into one another, to constitue a systematic whole”.  His beautiful description of the Umwelt of a tick has been reproduced in Andy Clark’s “Being There”.  He points out how each animal encounters an entirely subjective form of space and time, and how the activity of the animal is related to the experience of time.  “Without a living subject, there can be no time”. Mind you, he makes the questionable assumption that there is something like a quantum of experience that in humans is about 1/18 sec, and that is modality independent.  But that is more than compensated for by his delightful Fig 14 showing a snail held atop a large rubber ball carried by water.

This ought to sound familiar: “As the spider spins its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain characters of the things around him, and weaves them into a firm web which carries his existence.”

Where I speak of a “phenomenal bubble”, he says “We may therefore picture all the animals around us, be they beetles, butterfliesm flies, mosquitoes or dragonflies that people a meadow, enclosed within soap bubbles, which confine their visual space and contain all that is visible to them….Only when this fact is clearly grasped shall we recognize the soap bubble which encloses each of us as well.  Then we shall also see all our fellow men in their individual soap bubbles, which intersect each other smoothly, because they are built up of subjective perceptual signs.  There is no space independent of subjects.  If we still cling to the fiction of an all-encompassing universal space, we do so only because this conventional fable facilitates mutual communication”.

He has a view of nervous system activity appropriate to his time.  He considers central organization, and the relative independence of reflex arcs, when he says: “when a dog runs, the animal moves its legs; when a sea urchin runs, the legs move the animal”.  That’s a nice quote for later use in discussing agency!

Long before Gibson’s theory of affordances, we see von Uexküll saying: “How do we manage to see sitting in a chair, drinking in a cup, climbing in a ladder, none of which are given perceptually?  In all the objects that we have learned to use, we see the function which we perform with them as surely as we see their shape or color.”

There are limitations.  He reminds me of Dennett in his ability to drive a whole wagonful of arguments up to the edge of a cliff, but he then refuses to jump off.  Thus, at one point toward the end we read: “…Thus we ultimately reach the conclusion that each subject lives in a world composed of subjective realities alone, and that even the Umwelten themselves represent only subjective realities… Whoever denies the existence of subjective realities, has failed to recognize the foundations of his own Umwelt.”  And yet earlier, he commits just this error when he says: “The Umwelt of any animal that we wish to investigate is only a section carved out of the environment which we see spread around it-and this environment is nothing but our own human world.”  Aarghh, how did he not notice that error?

He comes across as a well meaning pantheist at the very end: “And yet all these diverse Umwelten are harbored and borne by the One that remains forever barred to all Umwelten.  Behind all the worlds created by Him, there lies concealed, eternally beyond the reach of knowledge, the subject – Nature.”

Thomas Nagel does not cite him.  Hang your head in shame, Thomas!

Here’s the article, in two scans: [Part 1] [

 

Merging people…..

I found the following po-faced discussion on a Wikipedia community page: 

 rather than proposing that Notability (people), (pornographic actors) and (academics) be merged into Notability, it is proposed that (pornographic actors) and (academics) are merged into (people). The reasoning being that porn actors and academics are people, so one tidy set of guidelines can be drawn up to accommodate them. 

 

I am this poem

 

Fodor on Strawson

Jerry Fodor, who is not a reliable interpreter of other people’s positions (but he does write beautifully) is not impressed by the conclusions of Galen Strawson’s new book: Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?. Strawson, by Fdor’s account, swallows all sorts of camels in clinging determinedly to Monism (there is only one kind of stuff) and the reality of Consciousness, and a third, more problematic claim: Emergence of consciousness isn’t possible, because ‘For any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.’

Looks like Strawson is on the right path in his tenacity, but being tripped up by the usual philosopher’s drivel. However, the interesting quote is only tangentially related to the book under review. Fodor says:

I think it’s strictly true that we can’t, as things stand now, so much as imagine the solution of the hard problem. The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling. (That’s assuming what’s by no means obvious: that we are smart enough to solve it at all.) Philosophers used to think (some still do) that a bit of analytical tidying up would make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to think that. There is hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.

And later:

Anyhow, Strawson is right that the hard problem really is very hard; and I share his intuition that it isn’t going to get solved for free. Views that we cherish will be damaged in the process; the serious question is which ones and how badly. If you want an idea of just how hard the hard problem is, and just how strange things can look when you face its hardness without flinching, this is the right book to read.

Once more, I find myself standing with Fodor. But I have seen further! What a great feeling:) (and, no, I’m not stoned).

 

Triangle-centered perception

 If a triangle could speak it would say that God is eminently triangular.

Spinoza (WK quotes)

 

Parting company with Spinoza

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Here I have to disagree, and see his conception of the pantheistic god as a failure to recognitze our contingency and forced relativism.  But that would have been too much for him, no?

 

Enlightenment

Wk:

In his famous 1784 essay What Is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant described it as follows:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the incapacity to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Such tutelage is self-imposed if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.

Kant reasoned that although a man must obey in his civil duties, he must make public his use of reason. His motto for enlightenment is Sapere aude! or “Dare to know.”

 

Spinoza: titbits

From wikipedia:

Spinoza, having dedicated himself completely to philosophy after 1656 [when he was excommunicated from the Jewish faith], fervently desired to change the world through establishing a clandestine philosophical sect. Because of public censure this was only eventually realized after his death through the dedicated intercession of his friends.

I only hope I don’t have to wait that long!

He contended that everything that exists in Nature/Universe is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part.

So far, so good…..

He has an argument for what looks a lot like R-world, and he calls “substance”.  Astonishing that he could have seen so far, but what are termed ‘proofs’ are no such thing.  I see vision here, rather than argument.  Here’s a ovely tie in to Bhuddism:

So freedom is not the possibility to say “no” to what happens to us but the possibility to say “yes” and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way.

Some of Spinoza’s philosophical positions are:

• The natural world is infinite. [? what does that mean?]
  
• Good and evil are definitions of Humans not nature. [Yay!]
  
• Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine. [hmmm.  trust the monkey?]
  
• All rights are derived from the State. [interesting claim]
  
• Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animals’ status in nature. [Lots of room for work here]

Here’s a beauty from his Ethics:

His concept of three types of knowledge – opinion, reason, intuitive – and assertion that intuitive knowledge provides the greatest satisfaction of mind, leads to his proposition that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more perfect and blessed we are (in reality) and that only intuitive knowledge is eternal.

Wittgenstein nodded in Spinoza’s direction when he said:

“If by eternity is understood not eternal temporal duration, but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.” (6.4311) “The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.” (6.45) (TLP)

… and Einstein (who is much over cited normally) had this to say, on being asked whether he believed in God:

Einstein responded by telegram “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

 Neutral Monism isgenerally laid at Sponoza’s door:Neutral monism, in philosophy, is the metaphysical view that existence consists of one kind (hence monism) of primal substance, which in itself is neither mental nor physical, but is capable of mental and physical aspects or attributes.

 

Varela quote: SPOV as a natural phenomenon

From Varela’s essay after his liver transplant:

> Given that the scientific tradition has construed the natural as
> the objective, and thus has made it impossible to see the seamless
> unity between the natural and the phenomenal by making sure they
> are kept apart, no ‘bridging’ or ‘putting together’ would do the
> work. The only way is to mobilize here a re-examination of the very
> basis of modern science. But this gets, all of a sudden, too
> ambitious.

> This defies the habitual move to see mind and consciousness as
> inside the head/brain, instead of inseparably enfolded with the
> experience of others

There’s lots more there I don’t yet follow.

 

Merleau-Ponty quote: Human centered Perception

From a wikipedia potted account:

Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually ‘engaged’.
The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of our body and its sensory functions. Taking up and coinciding with the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnated subjectivity intentionally reconstructs things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its pre-conscious, pre-predicative understanding of the world’s make-up. Things are that upon which our body has a grip, while the grip itself is a function of our connaturality with the world’s things.

Note that last one:  we see what we see by virtue of what we are.  How would you cross-reference that alignment of view in your website????

This guy sounds interesting, but jargon ridden. Again, I’m only quoting wikipedia, but this is bad:

The essential partiality of our view of things, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be co-present with us and with other things than through such “Abschattung” (Shading). The thing transcends our view, but is reaffirmed by the perspective from which that view is seen. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background–to the nexus of meaningful relations between objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other (much in the style of Leibniz’s monads).

But this is interesting:

Critics have remarked that while Merleau-Ponty makes a great effort to break away from Cartesian dualism, in the end the “Phenomenology of Perception” still starts out from the opposition of consciousness and its objects. Merleau-Ponty himself also acknowledged this, and in his later work proceeded from a standpoint of unity, replacing notions that still centre on the subject by notions of “Being” and the essential reversibility of seeing and being visible.

Being near the phenomenologists makes me nervous.