Umwelt

In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal."[1] The term is usually translated as "self-centered world".[2] Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. Basically, it is the idea that an organism, like homosapiens, can only perceive a part of the world, reality, the part they are biologically designed to perceive. Take light, which exists as ultraviolet, infrared, x-ray, our eyes can only perceive less than one trillionth of the spectrum. There are whole realities we can't perceive.