A male Australian jewel beetle confuses a discarded beer bottle with the ideal mate. Despite the perceptible differences between a beer bottle and a female jewel beetle, he will stay perched on the back of the bottle, believing fully that he has achieved the reproductive opportunity of a truly massive female. His dreams, however, for robust offspring is an empty illusion. In a certain way, this seems funny to us, and it has to do with the umwelt of a creature.
The Oxford online dictionary (Lexico) defines umwelt as “(in ethology) the world as it is experienced by a particular organism”. In the umwelt of the jewel beetle the empty beer bottle seems a perfect mate, but to our umwelt it appears as a sterile exercise, a sad mistake.
Prime numbers are a mystery to a rat, so a rat cannot solve a prime number maze, as Noam Chomsky noted. We have mysteries too; only portions of perceptual data are collected by our sense organs; this perceptual collection marks out our umwelt. We see through a dark glass in this life, and this led Plato to affirm the reality of God and Ideas, and to dismiss the muddled experience of the senses. His student, Aristotle helped to put science and a trust in the senses back into the world, and the scientific method – to which so much of our modern world relates - has aptly been called the greatest single creation of modern humans.
Using the scientific method to study consciousness, Anil Seth, a researcher at the University of Sussex, in his Ted Talks entitled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality” given in Vancouver in April of 2017 describes consciousness as a type of controlled hallucination. Perception, for Seth, is the best guess by the brain about what is out there, and it comes from an interaction of our sense organs with our brains. Our brain, locked inside a cage of bone, produces a controlled hallucination that we agree upon as reality. The scientific method has verification of a test result as a touchstone to authenticity; this is the way around the confines of solipsism. Other living creatures, like our pet dogs, have consciousness too, but their umwelt differs from ours.
What lies outside our umwelt? God and immortality, dark matter and dark energy (perhaps). We are animals, and having a sentient body seems necessary for consciousness. A computer, no matter how “smart” it is, can never gain consciousness, Seth maintains.
The controlled hallucination of consciousness is compelling, more so to some people than to others, but it clearly is not all that is there. Spiritual people believe that God, Justice, Truth, and Beauty exist outside our umwelt, and that the soul is immortal; it is a beautiful concept. In Science and Math, the beauty of a conjecture contributes to its truthfulness, and we should extend the same maxim to the world of the spirit.
I agree with both Plato and Aristotle. I believe with Plato that God is the supreme Being and that the soul is immortal, but I also believe in the power of empiricism, as started strongly by Aristotle, and as verified by the scientific method, a crucial factor in our technological world today. We are animals, as Seth and Aristotle suggest, but we are also beings with belief in immortality and God, as Plato believed; we are animals of faith.
This article is largely as it was published in Logberg-Heimskringla newspaper in the 15 August 2019 issue.
This article is largely as it was published in Logberg-Heimskringla newspaper in the 15 August 2019 issue.
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