The Umwelt

Yesterday I was out in the yard with my cat, and watched her lift her nose to the wind. She was reading the scents of our neighborhood in a way I am completely incapable of. Often times I have seen her sniff at a bush and wished she could tell me the story of who passed by in the night. I sniff the bush and I don’t smell anything.

I see my neighbor’s dog prick up his ears: he hears something that is totally beyond my hearing. What does he know that I don’t know?

There is a world of sense experience all around me that these animals smell and hear but I am completely unaware of. What else might be right here under my nose that I can’t sense? I think I perceive all of reality as it is, but my cat and the dog show me I don’t.

A century ago a German biologist noticed this disparity in sense perception and came up with a term for an organism’s personal reality: the umwelt.

Consequences of No Free Will - Society

What would it mean to live in a world without free will? We can divide the consequences into two main categories: the personal and the social. In this post I’ll address the social, and in a later one I’ll write about what this means for our personal lives (hint: it’s great news).

The first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they contemplate life without free will is crime. The thinking goes something like this: If we don’t freely choose our actions, then we aren’t responsible for what we do and thus we can’t be held accountable. Every criminal will be found “not guilty because of extenuating circumstances beyond his or her control.” Crime will explode and anarchy will reign.

A punitive justice system like the one operating in the United States is entirely based upon the belief in free will. When a person is found to be guilty, the thinking process for that decision goes like this:

1. You know the difference between right and wrong.


2. You have the power to freely choose between right and wrong.


3. You willfully chose wrong.


4. You are, therefore, guilty of willful wrongdoing.


5. You deserve to be punished.

At serial killer/necrophile/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial in Milwaukee, one of the prosecution’s arguments that the defendant was in his “right mind” - sane, aware of the difference between right and wrong, capable of rational choice, possessing free will - was that Mr. Dahmer had demonstrated prudent and rational thinking by using a condom when having sex with the corpses of his victims.