If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Commonly associated with the absence of the human receiver to experience the sound vibrations,  this thought experiment acquires ever new meanings in today’s technologically driven, post-Anthropocentric world.

It is through our senses that we perceive each other and the world around us. The senses we use determine the way we engage with our environments. Yet we are conditioned to pay attention to only a limited range of sensory inputs; our senses operate as filters that process, accept, and remove certain sensory cues. Thus human “reality” is only a  representation of what our five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) allow us to perceive, capturing only a small fraction of the world around us. The unwitnessed falling tree leaves us with the question—what constitutes reality? What about whale songs and high-pitched sounds of insects, chemical flows, wavelengths of light that do not reach our retina, Earth’s magnetic field lines traversing space, and other dynamics of the world that happen outside and beyond human perception? The awareness of human perceptual limitations makes one think about the independence of things from human agency and other than human sentience.

Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt refers to the unique sensory world of a  particular organism. Specific organism-environment makes species inhabit different worlds, according to the senses they possess. Different animals rely on different sensoria,  that are not limited to our Western classification of five dominant senses. These can range from electroreception (ability to detect electric fields), olfaction (sense of smell), gustation  (sense of taste), and hygroreception (ability to detect changes in moisture). They also detect a wider array of sounds, smells, and colours. Bats echolocate insects, sharks detect electrical fields, snakes see infrared radiation, and bees sense magnetic fields. Elephants communicate using chemicals and odours. Plants detect and monitor air pollutants.  Therefore, the sensory world of animals and plants falls outside what we can see, hear and perceive. The intelligence of microorganisms and plants still remains largely inaccessible to us. How does the world appear to a tree? What do trees know?

Η συνέχεια εδώ.