Umwelt
A concept from the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll referring to the subjective, species-specific perceptual and behavioral world of an organism — the “self-world” constituted by the signals an organism is capable of detecting and the actions it is capable of taking. Each organism inhabits a distinct umwelt, perceiving only those features of the environment that are meaningful to its particular form of life. A tick’s umwelt consists of light, butyric acid (a mammal-skin scent), and warmth; a human’s umwelt includes language, symbolic systems, and aesthetic experience.
In the Noöpunk context, the umwelt concept is crucial for articulating the political and economic stakes of cognitive diversity: “Nonhuman minds will continue to be marginalized until they can participate, stake their claim in the social fabric, escalate to the status of quantitative mattering.” (— noopunk) The “umwelt gap” between human and nonhuman cognitive systems is the practical challenge of building economic and governance systems that can engage diverse intelligences — not through rights-based or legalistic models requiring centralized bodies, but through direct participation.
The noöpunk project aims at “a mass decentralized experiment in biodata intermediation… to the end of establishing direct feeds of intent or desire” across the umwelt gap — building interfaces adequate to radically diverse token economies that might contain obscure intents. Philip K. Dick’s unrealized novel about aliens who perceive far more of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans (for whom Earth is heaven) dramatizes the stakes of umwelt pluralism: “from their perspective, humans were capable of sight but nearly blind, such as a mole appears to a human.”