A bear’s sense of smell is several hundred times better than a human’s. An eagle’s eyesight 4-5 times better. Birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Dolphins, bats and elephants have amazing hearing. The superior senses of various animals to those of humans emphasize to me how much more embedded they are in their environment. If we do not sense our environment in such depth, we cannot process information about it. If we cannot process information about it, what are we perceiving? How ‘off’ can our perceptions be and us still expect to survive in the environment?

Living ‘in’ the environment rather than ‘on‘ it means perceiving it in depth, and responding to those perceptions. Yet in comparison with non-human animals, it seems our perceptions of the environment are anything but deep. However, there is a fascinating podcast about spiders I highly recommend. In it, we learn about how a spider’s web is part of its ‘umwelt‘, an extension to its body that enhances its perception of the environment. The web is, in other words, a part of the spider — even if it seems separate. Technology has done the same to us. I can know about a fire or a flood on the other side of the world through the internet (the World-Wide Web). That web is part of my umwelt, and my senses extend far beyond the immediate environment my eyes can see, my skin can feel, my nose can smell, or my ears can hear. In a way, technology has corrected for the lack of sensory depth provided by nature. If I so choose, I can learn about the environment from the microbial to the galactic, all through the internet. There is even a livestream of the view of the earth from the space station — something no non-human animal could ever have seen.

The separateness of the spider and its web emphasizes a further point: while we may see cyborgs in sci-fi as the melding of meatware and hardware, there is in fact no need to go as far as surgical implants to become a cyborg. We can extend our umwelt through physical interaction with external technology. Thus, using technology, be it a land-line phone, radio, television, or the internet, already makes us cyborgs: our sensory perceptions have been enhanced; neurones in our brains are storing knowledge we could not access without these technologies, as well as information on how to use them. Humans began to become cyborgs with the invention of the telegraph.

There is another, more interesting lesson from the spider and its web. Unlike spiders, we share the technology used to extend our umwelt. Hence, in a way that was never possible previously, our umwelts intersect. Specifically, if a web is part of the spider’s sensory machinery — not to be seen as separate from the spider, and the internet is similarly part of ours, then since we don’t each have our own internet, we are now parts of each other, and the internet has made us so. Our consciousnesses are now interconnected. This is an astonishing thing for me to find myself writing — a sort of techno-mysticism (I am not the first to coin that term).

To separate us from the internet is to deprive us of a sense, like losing a sense of smell. But more than this, it deprives us of a connectivity with each other that is now part of our everyday existence. No wonder people joke about WiFi (and, funnily enough, battery life — something only a cyborg would worry about) needing to be added to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I suggested earlier that we can have superior, deep, senses of the environment through technology, emphasizing ‘if we so choose’. The internet also contains a huge amount of material that is nothing to do with sensing or learning about the environment; indeed it contains active misinformation, as well as fantasy. The internet can be used to escape from the environment rather than perceive it in greater depth. It can subsitute our senses of the environment with senses of alternative realities — non-sense. These alternative realities are now parts of our realities, affecting our neural wiring, discourse and behaviour. As much as the internet can enhance our awareness of the environment, then, it can also enhance our misperception of it, and how ‘off’ our behaviour is, as I raised in the opening paragraph. The question remains, then, of whether we can still expect to survive in the environment…