Guy Reams (00:01.146)
Today is day 151. Your umvelt. Another's umgebong. Umgebong. So, my wife and I, we went on a trip this weekend to a small town just to get away for the night. So we went to left on Friday, came back on Saturday. No big deal. But while we were there, I had an opportunity to read
A book that I got now. The book was recommended by Ryan Holiday on his book reading list, so I'm reading through a few of those books. So this book was The Tiger by John. Valiant, I think is how you pronounce his name. Anyway, it's a book about. Eastern Russia and an incident where a tiger attacked and killed a man, and it's kind of like his investigative report on that, which is really interesting, but during.
the book, he uncovers this German biologist who wrote extensively on his findings in study in basic biology, especially from sea creatures. His name was Jacob von Uexel, I think is how you say it. Anyway, he had a theory that ran completely contrary to the popular psychological model,
the interaction between humans or what was going on in the human's brain that was common at the time. I mean, most psychologists at the time had concepts like the black box, like there's inputs and outputs that go into a human, but we don't really care what goes on inside the human's head. We just really care about what the inputs and outputs are. And then the other idea was that the human consciousness sits like behind a stage and watches all this stuff happen in front of the eyes or behind the senses and then interprets them.
However, Uexil came up with this, or I think it's probably U -exil, came up with the idea that that's partially true. The intelligence is interpreting things around it, but there's more going on there. And his idea was that they had an umwelt, which is, there's like, you know how you heard that people live within their own bubbles? Well, that's exactly what it is.
Guy Reams (02:28.91)
A person's unbelt is the way they interact with, react to, and cognitively deal with the world around them. And that will not always be the same. So if you put two intelligent entities into the same environment, they are going to interpret what's around them completely different because they will have their own unbelt. So during our retreat, which by the way, while I was on the retreat, we...
we felt more relaxed. And this has a lot to do with Umdell because while we were there, we removed ourselves from our normal lives where we have all these things reminding us of all the stress in our lives. But when we got to somewhere else that was completely devoid of those reminders, we were suddenly able to feel relaxed and less anxious and able to have conversations about more future thinking things rather than dealing with the environment that we were in.
So both my wife and I's umvelts were seriously being impacted by the environment we found ourselves in. So just a side note. Now, this is an extremely relevant topic. Although this theory was developed back in World War II times, back in their 40s and 50s, this theory has a lot of applicability to today.
because nowadays we're dealing with artificial intelligence or thinking machines. Now, we all know that animals can think. In relation to this book, The Tiger, he was talking about what the tiger's unbelt was versus what the human's unbelt was, which just makes sense, right? But nowadays, I mean, a tiger is an incredibly intelligent being, right? But like, I'll compare it to my dogs. My dogs are pretty intelligent, but the difference in their intelligence and their rationality between that of a human is vastly different.
So I don't really consciously think about this much, other than they clearly want food or they wanna go for a walk. But now we've got artificial machines, intelligent machines that are just as capable of interpreting inputs and outputs around them in order to make rational and in case sometimes cognitive decision making, which is really interesting, because we now are humans interacting with
Guy Reams (04:54.733)
a world that has devices or machines that could potentially be having their own unvelts, just like us. Now this actually, this unvelt concept really solves a conundrum because one of the problems that artificial intelligence has always been trying to figure out what the causal link is behind thought, right? Like what causes somebody to think this way? What causes somebody to make a rational decision? And if you keep extrapolating that out, like if you have the view that,
Rational thought is just somebody sitting back, something inside your head sitting back watching a TV screen. If that's your thought, if that's what you're thinking, then you gotta think, well, okay, the watcher inside my head is watching these events play out, but then who's watching the watcher? And you can keep going back and back and back and back, and you have this regressive iteration, going back and back, trying to figure out what the root causes. So having a whole bunch of causal links like this makes it really hard to figure out what rational,
thought is. This idea of an unbelt is that rational thought is not, doesn't have to have that causal link chain. It can be a human's ability or any thinking machine's ability to rationally consider what's around them and come up with their own perception of reality. And that sounds more true to me than anything else, right? Because I know that when me and another person walk into the same environment, we are going to have a totally
completely different view of what was going on. We might even see different things and we might even remember different things, which is incredible if you think about it, right? So I think this is an interesting relevant thought to have. It's like when you interact with other humans, right, you have to know that they have their own umbelts. Now, when you see another human, you can take guesses or even another machine. You can look at another artificial intelligence or another human and you can make
guesses as to what their unveled is. Like you could say, I understand what that person's saying. They're not seeing the same thing I am. They're seeing something different. Well, that's what Uexil called the um -gi -bang, right? Your view of another person's unveled. It's your extrapolation of what you think their unveled is. Well, that's interesting, right? Because now we can start making assumptions.
Guy Reams (07:20.597)
about how another would interact with us based on the current situation. So I had a real life, because this was so topical in my head, on our way back home I had a real life interaction with a couple of umbelts. And this was when I was driving through an intersection, a Tesla driver pulled out in front of me. Now, the Tesla driver was not aware that he almost collided with me. But the Tesla itself,
slightly diverted the path to avoid the collision. And so did I. I slowed down at the simultaneous time that the Tesla diverted the path slightly to the right, which avoided the collision. Now, I don't think the Tesla driver was aware that this was going on. Other than maybe his vehicle slightly taking a different path, maybe he noticed that. I noticed that he was wearing glasses, which I assumed to be prescription. I noticed that he...
clearly had the radio on, I can see the big screen on his Tesla, and his girlfriend or wife or whoever it was, I'm assuming a girlfriend because I have this bias that girlfriends are more distracting than wives. Maybe that's, hmm. Maybe that's not right. I mean, whatever. She was talking on the phone, right, while he's driving, pulling through an intersection. So there's all these distractions going on. And so I had a view.
of his um -gy -bang. I had an um -gy -bang of that driver and he had his own um -belt and so did I. So all these things are interacting at an intersection. Now luckily for me, the Tesla made an intelligent choice and so did I. So we avoided the collision. But this kind of gives you an interesting view on perceptions and interaction, right? The incident with the Tesla,
shows you that there is a constant interplay going on between the way each of us view our own reality, the environment around us, and our interactions with that environment, and also how we perceive others are viewing their environment to reality, which is really fascinating. So this is just an interesting topic. I was pretty impressed by it. So just sharing it with you. Thank you.