Epistolution Musing №11: The Umwelt
Dear Friends,
This letter is part of a weekly series of brief thoughts I would like to share with you, either because I’ve come across your related work in biology or because you’re a person I like. I discovered an interesting problem in 2019, a problem I can’t forget. Epistolution is the unknown biological mechanism that purposefully applies genetic influences to finding and solving problems. Although all living behavior requires epistolution, especially clear examples include embryonic development, wound healing, regeneration, cancer, learning, memory, creativity, swarm intelligence, epigenetic inheritance, and the placebo effect.
While I was living in New Haven, Connecticut, before the pizza place on my block was opened, I often went to bed hungry. Exhausted and careless after working and riding in the horse barn down Derby Avenue, I often skipped supper and went straight home to sleep. When the new restaurant opened its doors, all that changed quickly. I would often be tempted instead to stop in and order a beer and a large Greek salad and a medium pepperoni pizza, and then linger and treat myself to a dessert of vanilla ice cream. My mouth still waters at the thought of those lavish dinners. About a year after this occurred, I noticed that I had expanded from a 34 to a 36-inch waistline, and began to attempt some sort of moderation, but the habit was already formed.
My behavior eating pizza was cellular behavior, and it had cellular consequences. If we extrapolate the changes in behavior of a cell to the entire organism, we notice that all behaviors are in some ways direct consequences of epigenetic markings. So what controls these markings? One theory holds that the genome contains its own instructions for interpretation, but it is obvious that the genome isn’t the only thing in the loop that controls gene expression. If it were, all cells in the body would look and behave identically, and they do not. In my case, there was a pizza restaurant in the loop, resulting in fat accumulation in the cells in my waist. If the loops of causation that determine cellular behavior reach as far out into the world as a pizza restaurant, where else do they go?
Jakob von Uexküll invented the term Umwelt, or “surround-world” in German, to describe the subjective set of interactions an organism might have with its particular surroundings. In a memorable passage from his book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, he details the sensory system of a tick who waits for months for the faint odor of butyric acid, a substance which emanates from the sebaceous glands of all mammals. Barely discernable to humans, the butyric acid holds precious significance for the tick, causing her to jump from her perch on a leaf and attempt to fasten herself to the passing host. His point is that while we think of an “environment” as an objective space in the “real world” that we all can share and talk about, in fact each organism is in a set of unique interactions with only the private world that they construct around themselves. The Santiago Theory of cognition writers Maturana and Varela described it this way: to them an organism is like a submarine. To the operator of the vessel in his chamber there is no sea, no current, and no topography of seafloor. There are only the readings on the instrument panel and the computations in the charts. There is no shared reality, really.
As it interacts with its surroundings, its umwelt, each cell winds up with a unique set of epigenetic markings and a unique pattern of gene expression. In the case of a multicellular organism, all somatic cells share the same genome, yet the epigenetic patterns end up quite distinct depending on the local surroundings. The causes that shape the local interactions determine behavior, and the causes that determine those local causes are just more distant causes, like pizza restaurants. Outside those distant pizza-restaurant-type causes are just more distant causes, like national economic conditions and wheat supplies. There are no sets of particles that are not influenced, eventually, by the set of particles around them. There really is no outer boundary of what can feed into the behavior of an organism. An animal is just a sensitive set of organs designed to pick up a causal map of its private surroundings. This notion, the idea that large-scale events can help determine cellular functions, is called downward causation.
In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, humans are chained to a wall belowground and the light of the true world of things-in-themselves shines from behind them. This light, raining down from an objective reality, is not directly visible to the prisoners. All they can see is what is before their eyes, blurred and distorted shadows projected onto the uneven clay in front of their faces. This metaphor is meant to present us with a vivid picture of our relationship with objectivity. In Western culture, and to some extent perhaps in every human culture, we have created the idea of a shared reality, a true world where everything is correctly known. In monotheism this world is in the mind of God, but even polytheists and especially atheists share this imaginative trope, not the cave and the wall, but the idea of a “real world” that more than one person can access. Every human needs this trope to begin a sentence, to make a signal, to utter a breath in communication because the trope is absolutely necessary for translation of anything from one mind into another mind. Without a shared reality, no meaningful content could pass from one entity to another. And yet we know that this shared reality is purely make-believe.
Uexküll showed us that the subjectivity of life is far, far deeper than we can imagine. I included his concept in this section of the essays because it shows us just how far away we are from being able to readily identify the knowledge that other life forms are building. We are physically comprised in an entirely different way than, say, a lichen, and yet a lichen has sensitivities to its umwelt that we may never fully appreciate. Plants, for example, have a sense of hearing, a fact that was not discovered until this decade. But even the term “a sense of hearing” is problematic when applied to a plant’s umwelt. It is merely, as Nietzche said about all words, a dead metaphor, a coin whose image has rubbed off from use. It is an inappropriate comparison of what happens in autotrophic plant cells with what happens in human ears.
It also shows that you can’t assume anything is “dumb” or inert that is living. This doesn’t mean that nonhuman cognitive abilities are necessarily profound; a fungus cannot write a sonnet. It just means that their worlds are fundamentally different from our own umwelten, and to the extent they are different we cannot communicate or share understanding with them. A fungus cannot rhyme in couplets, but it can feel and “think’ in ways that we can hardly fathom. It makes us humble to know that the words we use in language with one another are fundamentally imprecise, even among humans who speak a common tongue. They are only meaningful insofar as they have been beaten in the forge of our own umwelt. When they are picked up in another’s world they are like drifting leaves, alien, unexpected, irresolute.
The epistolution mechanism allows subjectivity to become focused into an almost infinitely various collection of points of view. Every cell, every organism on earth has a subjectivity of some sort. That fact boggles the mind. Indeed it redefines mind, and extends it into spaces we cannot begin to fathom. There are nearly infinite minds, infinite forms of mind, on this earth.
The fourth face of cellular knowledge is that it is open-ended. This means that an epistevolver cannot be programmed to solve identifiable problems that are formulated from the point of view of a human observer. It must instead be able to discover its own problems and solutions. This seems to provide a fundamental barrier to formulating a test for epistolution, but I think it is not as severe as all that. I suspect that once we begin to float possible models we will be able to intuitively witness a degree of insight developed by the algorithms, and judge to what degree they are learning.
Continuing with our pattern of scientific but wide-eyed impressionism, in the next section we look at the phenomenon of beauty, and we find out how a fundamental thermodynamic truth about life can be observed by paying close attention to what is beautiful.
Be Kind, and Be Brave.
Love, Charlie
