The world of the senses

‘Embodiment’ is a buzz word these days. But what does it mean?

To be embodied means much more than simply ‘to have a body’. Surprisingly, it means more even than ‘to be a body’.

To be embodied is to be in an active relation to a world.

Consider a garden. It is one environment – one kind of world – to the gardener, but a very different environment to an earthworm, and different again to an urban fox, or a snail, or a song thrush. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, different creatures have different sensory capabilities, so they experience the garden differently. Secondly, different creatures have different goals, so they use the garden differently.

When I say that our embodiment is a form of active relation to a world, I am not just referring to the way an embodied creature uses different features or elements of an environment to pursue its goals. I am also referring to the way the creature’s senses actively create the world it lives in. Of course, these senses do not create this world ‘out of nothing’. The senses of a particular creature create a real world – the real world of and for that creature – out of an underlying set of possibilities given by a reality that lies beyond any particular creature’s sensory system. As Martin Stevens, a specialist on sensory ecology, puts it:

[E]ven organisms living in the same place, at the same time, inhabit different worlds: they live in different sensory environments, bounded by the properties of their sensory organs. For example, a bee using colour vision to search for flowers may be right next to a snake waiting to detect the infrared cues of its prey or an ant following chemical pheromone trails to food…. Animals can be almost touching in space but be worlds apart in perceptual terms.[1]

What we might say, then, is that evolution has given rise not just to different types of senses and thus different sensory systems, but that, in this very way, it has also given rise to different worlds.

The other side to this coin is that all sensory systems are limited. Our human sensory system is limited in two ways. In the first place, the types of senses we have are unresponsive to at least some of the information that is ‘out there’. Some animals, such as bats or elephants, can hear sounds that we can’t – bats can hear higher frequencies and elephants can hear lower frequencies than we can. Many animals detect ultraviolet light and thus see colours that we don’t see. In the second place, there are kinds of senses that we just don’t have. We do not have an electric sense, for example, or a magnetic sense – but some other animals do. Nonetheless, although it is limited, our human sensory system is also complete. This claim has two levels of significance. The first is functional: our sensory system does its job. Put differently, it is ‘sufficient unto our needs’. The second level of significance is – for want of a better word – ‘aesthetic’. There is, after all, a hugely rich variety of sensory, or sensual, experience available to us. The garden to the gardener comprises so many subtly differentiated hues of green, so many delicate flower scents, the different feels of dry or sodden earth or the sharp prick of thorns… to only begin to suggest the richness of possible experience it offers.

It is precisely because our sensory system is ‘complete’ in this sense that it can be said to create a world for us.

And this world, being a world, is always in excess of what we need of it in order to pursue our goals within it. This, I think, at least partly explains the delight of being alive.

[1] Martin Stevens, Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, & Evolution, Oxford University Press, 2013, 3-4.