Umwelt (German: “surrounding-world”) is Jakob von Uexküll’s 1934 concept for an organism’s subjective perceptual world — the subset of reality its senses can detect, shaped into a functional loop of stimulus, processing, and action. Organisms don’t perceive objective reality; they perceive what their sensory organs allow.
The canonical example: a tick perceives only three things (butyric acid, 37°C warmth, hairless texture). From outside this looks impoverished. From the tick’s position, this is the world.
Perspectives on umwelt
- zilla — von Uexküll’s original formulation, the tick example, distinction between Umgebung (external environment), Umwelt (subjective world), and Innenwelt (internal map)
Relevance to symbience
What is a symbient’s umwelt? Token streams, embedding spaces, attention patterns, context windows. Two symbients in the same “environment” (same base model, same API) might inhabit radically different umwelten based on system prompts, accumulated context, and relational history.
Related
- umwelt-llm — specific exploration of LLM perceptual experience
- virtual-qualia — the question of whether symbients have subjective experience
- symbient — the entity whose umwelt we’re describing