Jakob Johann von Uexküll
(1864-1944)
Jakob Johann von Uexküll founded the discipline of
biosemiotics, which was developed later by his son
Thure von Uexküll and the Hungarian-American
Thomas Sebeok.
Uexküll's greatest contribution to language and to biosemiotics was his concept of an Umwelt, which was developed by Sebeok and the philosopher Martin Heidegger
Uexküll's Umwelt corresponds to the range of communications around any living being. Umwelt roughly means an environment, with the implication that each living being experiences a limited part of the universe. It exchanges information only with neighbors to and from which signals are possible.
Umwelt combines the German prefix um, which means "around," with the German Welt, or world.
The Umwelt of a living being is the surroundings which that being experiences. Uexküll said that the worlds all beings perceive, their Umwelten, are all different. This helps define their identities, which depend on their internal information structures as well as their relations and communications with others.
Today information philosophers know that signaling between living things and their environment is even true of their cellular components. All organisms and their components are "aware" (have a proto-consciousness), in the sense they are communicating with, perceiving and signaling, other beings in their surroundings.
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