Umwelt Beyond Biology
Exploring perceptions across species and silicon
Perhaps you are the person who notices your bad luck when a grocery bag breaks and your groceries spill in the parking lot. Or maybe you are the person who notices your good fortune that a kind stranger immediately stopped to help you. Same world, different perception.
When you think about it, it’s remarkable the variety of ways we humans perceive the world. We are a diurnal species with the same basic nutrition and metabolic needs and with the same sensory systems. Despite this, we sleep at different times, disagree on what foods are best, what temperature is the most comfortable, and what colors are most pleasing.
Imagine how different our worldviews would be if we biologically differed. What if I could see colors that you could not? Or if you could sense chemicals in the air that I was unaware of? We would be on the same planet but living in different worlds.
This is the concept captured by umwelt. Umwelt is the idea that, for a given species or even a specific individual, their worldview is shaped by their sensory systems and the perceptions that follow. When I say sensory systems, I’m referring to the physical act of detecting something in the environment: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling. How we process the information that we detect is our perception. I see a car moving very quickly directly toward me, and I perceive danger. I smell Coqui Coqui Tabaco Cologne and perceive that my husband is nearby.
My life and my worldview are indeed shaped by what I sense and perceive around me. What, then, is the experience of other animals?
Same place, same time; different worlds
Both humans and dogs possess the sense of smell, but dogs are famously good sniffers. Human and canine olfactory receptors are reasonably similar, but dogs express up to 50 times more olfactory receptors than humans. Imagine if you have one smoke detector in your house versus 50 all over your house. With 50, you would catch a fire in any room much faster.
Beyond that, the anatomy of the dog nose is specialized for sensitive odor detection. The way that they sniff concentrates odors in their nose, making them even more sensitive at odor detection. And then once they detect an odor, the part of the brain that processes that information is up to 40x larger in dogs than in humans.
All of this fundamentally changes the worldview - the umwelt - of dogs. The way we humans are fixated on what we can see is analogous to the fixation dogs have on smell. Walking down the street, greeting a neighbor, taking a drink of water - all of these activities involve sniffing if you’re a dog. I may be with my dog for each of these activities, but we are living in different worlds in the same place and time.
You’ve probably seen dogs working security, sniffing for explosives or drugs. This is a great example of their different umwelt in action. Personally, when I walk through the airport, I am only minimally aware of the smells around me unless I notice something particularly pleasing or offensive. The human brain dedicates more space to vision than any other sense, and indeed, most of my attention goes to what I see.
If the canine umwelt were also organized around sight, then they too would be useless for the olfactory detection of contraband in the airport. But the canine umwelt is smell-focused, allowing them to perform this sensitive work amid visual chaos.
The contributions of canines to human well-being are well known. Less well known are the contribution of other, less personable animals, like mussels. Mussels do not have eyes, ears, noses, or a central nervous system. The mussel will never describe a sunset, but it knows clean water when it senses it.
The robust sensory system in mussels includes receptors that are very sensitive to contaminants in the water. Mussels are filter feeders, so if they feed when there are high levels of pollutants in the water, they will die. To avoid this fate, mussels quickly close their shells when they detect contaminants in water and remain closed until the water is clean enough to feed again.
It turns out that this is a useful trick for humans. Mussels are so sensitive at detecting water contaminants that a number of municipal water agencies around the world use mussels as part of their water quality monitoring systems1. They attach small mechanisms directly to the shells of the mussels, and when a certain percentage of the mussels close their shells at the same time, they know there is contamination in the water. In most cases, the municipalities switch to using a reserve water supply while they figure out what is contaminating the water and make a plan to clean the water supply.
The contributions of dogs and mussels are part of a larger story of many different types of animals lending their special skills for the benefit of humans. I’ve noticed, though, that the stories we tell focus far more on the animals with an umwelt that more closely matches the umwelt of humans. What, then, is the relationship between umwelt and empathy?
Perceived Proximity and Limits of Empathy
Considering that empathy requires the ability to understand the feelings of another, it’s no surprise that there’s a correlation between umwelt and empathy. The more similarly we see the world, the easier it is to understand how you might feel in a given situation.
In addition to a high overlap of umwelt, dogs and humans enjoy excellent cross-communication with one another. It’s clear to us when a dog is happy, sad, excited, or scared. This communication reinforces to us that the dog is feeling what we might reasonably feel were we in their metaphorical shoes. Empathizing with a dog is easy.
Mussels on the other hand…it’s tough. I don’t know how it experiences discomfort or pain, because it’s entire nervous system is structured so differently that I cannot even imagine the analogous sensation. The umwelt gap is too large.
We even see this between humans, most often highlighted in painful examples of racism or misogyny. For years, many white doctors were so lacking in empathy towards their black patients that they claimed the black patients didn’t feel pain like their white patients and therefore didn’t need anesthesia. Or still today, when women report being in pain, it is routinely discounted and treated less than the equivalent report of pain from a man. The more we see something as “other,” the less we empathize and the greater our perception of a different umwelt.
All of this brings me to a central question that I’ve been chewing on for over a week: what is the umwelt of AI?
Human umwelt to binary and back again
The umwelt of AI is a bit of a paradox. As I mentioned, umwelt is defined as a function of sensory systems and downstream perceptions; AI systems lack sensory receptors, and there’s room for robust debate around the use of the word “perception” or “worldview” with regard to AI. Does AI have umwelt? Perhaps consider this a discussion of the functional umwelt or perceived umwelt of AI. Because at its core, that’s what I’m interested in. What is the human perception of the umwelt of AI?
All of the data being used to train AI models are biased by human umwelt. What do we perceive as important enough to measure? To optimize for? To predict? We package this information into various data structures, and fundamentally, it’s a conversion of the human worldview into binary code.
Our perception of AI models varies widely. The AI underlying song recommendations on Spotify is thoroughly rooted in human umwelt - based on what I have spent the most time listening to in the past, what will I spend the most time listening to in the future? But the interface matches what I have already come to associate with traditional software. So I think little about this application of AI, concerning myself only with whether or not the music is to my taste.
Generative AI, specifically those with a chat interface, creates a radically different experience. Trained on the use of human language, the performance of these models is based in large part on their ability to match human communication patterns. Or, put another way, can it imitate the human umwelt well enough to string words together ‘like a human’? And the difference in empathy triggered is huge. So good is the simulation that Miss Manners recommends using courtesy words towards ChatGPT to reinforce the habits of politeness2.
This relationship is independent of the sophistication of the AI. GenAI for image or sound creation does not prompt the same reaction from users. Nor does the AI running self-driving labs. The more you observe, the more clear it becomes that mimicry of the human experience through umwelt cues is the primary driver of our association.
Empathy trap: finding AI's true capabilities
So what if we empathize with some AI?
Putting aside the psychological implications of empathizing with AI, I see this as a potential limiter in our effective use of these tools. Despite creating the simulacrulum of human umwelt, AI is in fact radically different.
AI models have different strengths, and weaknesses, from humans. What are the things that AI models are uniquely capable of detecting? What can AI models uniquely process?
Focusing on how we are different is the first step in the pursuit of complementarity and synergy. While AI may be adept at pretending to be human, it is surely not the best use of the technology.
Teaching students modern tools includes teaching them about how to approach tools not yet invented. This means teaching students how to explore technological capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses to figure out the most valuable implementation of those technologies.
On the other side of the coin, what remains the unique strength of each individual person? As we perceive technologies to be more and more human, we must educate students how to continuously identify their own unique value.
And so I return to my question: What is the umwelt of AI?
Always striving for nearby