Perception, Language, and Living Organisms
I have spent a few hours the other day just observing a small millipede go about its day. I couldn't help but think about the interesting narratives that I was cooking up trying to understand what it was doing with its tiny eyes, antennas, legs, etc. I realised that my thinking was heavily influenced by my language and the words that I was using to describe its behaviour.
Can humans ever grasp how other living organisms perceive their environment? Are there any philosophical models which attempt at answering something like this?
Can humans ever grasp how other living organisms perceive their environment? Are there any philosophical models which attempt at answering something like this?
Comments (5)
Humans have yet to completely understand how they perceive their environment, much less how other organisms do.
Quoting Lord Paw
They seem to be one.
Yes, but humans are pretty complex relatively when contrasted with other simple living organisms. A human brain has 86 billion neurons whereas a roundworm has just 300 neurons. Makes one wonder in this case - should understanding come from deciphering simple organisms or from understanding ourselves and then dumbing it down to simpler organisms? Maybe the former is for the scientists and the latter is for philosophers?
Quoting skyblack
I don't think so. If thought can be described as "that allows humans to make sense of, interpret, represent or model the world they experience, and to make predictions about that world." In nature, we see a lot of animals which rely just on this definition to survive and do stuff. We see living organisms communicating through sounds, chemical signals, gestures, and so on all the time. Our species is just one experiment out of millions of species that nature tried.
Again, it is possible that our language might be playing tricks on us into thinking that we actually understand something that we clearly don't.
Well, there ya go.