Jakob J. von Uexkull (1864-1944) introduced the important concept of umwelt, often translated into English as “environment,” but more correctly seen as the perceptual world as perceived by the animal, to be distinguished from the umgebung, which refers to the “real,” objective environment. Von Uexküll famously discussed the umwelt of a tick, whose feeding behavior effectively involves of only three sensory inputs: (1) the odor of butyric acid, produced by mammals; (2) the temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, the body temperature of said mammals; and (3) the presence of hair or fur, whereupon the tick proceeds to burrow into its prey.This relates to my question about communicating with corporisations in order to speak the word of the Lord to them. To do that we need to know what channels of communication are open to us and how much of what kind of information we can convey through those channels. To work this out with corporisations, we need to determine their umwelt, their perceived environment. The complication is, of course, that we humans are part of their perceptual and information processing apparatus. So we have the challenge of learning to unknow some things in order to know them to some degree from the point of view of the corporisation.
I'm most often thinking about this issue in relation to the corporisation that is my university. So, what is the umwelt here? This question is somewhat different to how communications go on within the corporisation: the analogy on which I base that is recognising that the hormones, neural processing and chemical signals within a body are not the same (although linked) as the matter of sensing the 'outside' world.
So? Guesses and hypotheses to be tested:
Umwelt is
- people (mainly students?):
- money (fees, grants earnings);
- other corporisations (government agencies, partner institutions, competitors);
- human culture(s),
- buildings and other artefacts.
Vulture Visions - The Conversation - The Chronicle of Higher Education:
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