🏠 Home · 📚 Reading Notes · 📝 Articles · ℹ️ About

Umwelt

Definition

Umwelt is the system-specific subset of distinctions in the physical world that are accessible and actionable given a system’s sensory, motor, and internal constraints.

Different systems inhabit different Umwelten while remaining embedded in the same underlying reality.

Ontic / Core Claim

Umwelt does not describe what exists, but what can be accessed.

Given the same ontic distinctions:

• different organisms resolve different signals,
• different action possibilities become available,
• different records become usable.

Umwelt therefore characterizes epistemic access shaped by embodiment and organization, not ontic structure itself.

Distillation

An Umwelt is the slice of reality a system can touch.

Why it matters

• Biology: Explains species-specific perception without invoking subjectivism.
• Cognition: Grounds experience in constraint-limited access to distinctions.
• RDD coherence: Provides a biological analogue of Perspective without making it constitutive.
• AI: Clarifies that different sensorimotor stacks imply different accessible distinctions.

Links

• Related atoms:

  • Perspective
  • Distinction
  • Record (Memory Substrate)
  • Epistemic
  • State Space

• Used in molecules:

  • (none yet)

• Conflicts with:

  • Naive realism that assumes identical access across systems
  • Strong constructivism that treats perception as world-creating

Sources

• Source: Uexküll, J. von, Sagan, D., & Winthrop-Young, G. (2010). Foray into the worlds of animals and humans: With a theory of meaning (J. D. O’Neil, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
  • Key: @uexkullForayWorldsAnimals1934
  • Use here: Introduces Umwelt as organism-specific access to distinctions without denying a shared physical world.

Re-contextualization Log

• 2025-12-26 · context: Split from Perspective atom
  effect: created
  note: Isolated Umwelt as a biological concept describing constrained epistemic access rather than ontic structure.