The Importance of the Concept of Umwelt in a Changing World
Isabel Ferreira
In the last decades, humankind has been experiencing the cumulative effects of a profound technological development that has accelerated immensely the dynamics of human social life, that has been reshaping the human sphere of action and interaction, that has hybridised human reality by merging the natural and the artificial, creating new possible forms of agency and consequently new lived worlds.
According to Ferreira (2018, 2021, 2022), the deployment of artificial cognition in the twenty-first century, has introduced a fundamental twofold ontological shift: (i) tools have lost their purely instrumental status and have suddenly become potential autonomous entities capable of a form of shared agency when co-acting with humans and even capable of decision making in multiple circumstances (ii) the environment, on the other hand, has acquired a hybrid nature, where the analogic and the digital merge and where the physical and the virtual converge, where natural intelligence and autonomous artificial systems cohabit in a fusion that blurs the lines between the physical, the digital and the biological.
As Jesper Hoffmeyer pointed out (1996, 2008), life is fundamentally grounded in semiotic processes. The present paper claims that Uexkull’s concept of Umwelt and Hoffmeyer’s concept of Semiosphere play an essential role in the identification of the phenomena that the present technological (r)evolution brings about and in the analysis of its own dynamics.
References
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