Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. – Albert Einstein
“Dad,” I said enthusiastically, “did you know that there is no such thing as reality?” I was 19 and had just finished my first college semester. He had picked me up at the airport for the Christmas holidays. As many new college students are, I was full of myself. The word sophomoric clearly defined me at that moment: a delusion of having superior intelligence.
My father paused, thought a moment, looked at me, and asked, “Have you been doing drugs?”
I stuttered and did not deny.
Then he put his hand on the board. “Car,” he said. “Reality.”
We were stuck in a long line of cars leaving the airport.
He motioned. “Traffic, reality.”
Before I could clarify his clearly poor understanding of what I was trying to teach him, he added, “Your college tuition, reality.”
I was apparently smart enough to remain silent.
Of course, he was right. After college (that wonderful oasis surrounded by reality), there was work, money problems, relationships, marriage, kids, dogs and the rapid passing of time. All examples of reality.
And yet, putting my father’s Minnesotan sensibilities aside for a moment, when we dig a little deeper, reality—yours, mine and our dogs’—well, it gets interesting.
Let’s start with the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each man is asked to describe the elephant by touching one part. One man touches the tusk, another the legs, another the tail and so on. Each then describes what an elephant is using their limited information. In some tellings of the story, the men come to blows over their conclusions, believing they’re right and the others have no idea what they’re talking about.
To widen our frame, imagine that the men are different species, and they’re trying to describe “reality.” In this parable, let’s say we ask a red-tailed hawk, a shrew, an octopus, a mosquito, a whale and a dog. No doubt, each would provide profoundly different descriptions, not only because their environmental niches are so different, but because their perceptions, the ways they sense their environment, are so different.
Our daily walk
A daily example. We leave our house or apartment to walk our dog. It’s August. The park across the street is exploding in late summer blooms. Yet our dog can’t see or appreciate the colours the way we do. A dog’s normal vision has red-green colour blindness, so they can’t distinguish between those two colours.
Humans see more colours in the visible light spectrum, making us, by that measure, visually superior, but we shouldn’t get cocky. Like dogs, bees can’t see red, either, but they can see ultraviolet light. And many flowers have an ultraviolet “target” that we can’t see—as well as an electric charge bees can sense—which helps direct them to the nectar.
As we enter the park with our dog, we’re looking, but our dogs are smelling. Molecules of all sorts are wafting through the air from the dirt, trees, plants, and hydrants and inundating our dog with smells. Dogs can see in dim light better than we can, but their perception of the world is largely driven by smell.
I’ve caught myself several times impatiently pulling my dog’s leash when she stops to deeply smell a plant. I nudge her forward: Gotta keep moving! But that plant, which I mainly notice and sense visually, is an aromatic buffet for a dog. Imprinted in scent is a history of information: the rabbits that have grazed, the lizards that have scurried past, the other dogs that have peed.
Yanking a dog away when they’re smelling deeply is almost like putting a paper bag over someone’s head in the middle of a dramatic movie so they can’t see what happens next or how it ends.
The perception of time
Our experience of time is also a matter of perception. For instance, let’s add a fly to our species-based “blind men and the elephant” parable.
Just like an old film movie, our brains receive a series of discrete images from our eyes that the brain then smooths out to create what we perceive as unbroken visual movement. Yet different species process different “frame rates.” Humans see at a rate of about 60 images per second. Dogs are similar and see approximately 70 to 80 images per second. Yet the common house fly sees nearly 250 images a second, about four times faster than humans.
This means—here is the cool part—flies perceive time passing almost six times slower than humans. Thus, if a fly in the park lands on our arm, and we attempt to swat it away, the fly will see our arm move in what, to us, would be slow motion—easy for the fly to avoid.
The passage of time, which we measure with clocks, ticking or not, isn’t cast in stone. Every species perceives time differently. The question, of course, is who is right? As each species in our menagerie adds time to their descriptions of reality, even this won’t be uniform, constant. So is everything relative? Is this what Einstein meant? Arrrgh!
I might add that our age also impacts our perception of time. At 70, I find that time seems to gallop compared to those slow and boring hours in Mrs. Wanek’s world history class when I was 15.
So if the point of our parable is that the experience of reality is a function of perception, then the real question isn’t whose perception is most accurate, but why have our senses evolved to be so different? The answer is that our senses work the way they do not to “grok” ultimate reality—evolution doesn’t give a whit for our philosophical discourses on reality—but to help us survive as species in our own ways.
Umwelt
Welcome to umwelt.
The term umwelt was coined by Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944), a German biologist, and it roughly translates as “surrounding world or environment.” My favorite definition of umwelt (which is cited in many places) is that “the mind and the world are inseparable because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism.”
Every organism has its own umwelt, its own perception of reality, built on its evolutionary past: the bee that buzzes by us, the fly we attempt to swat, ourselves admiring the colourful flowers, and our dog straining at the leash to inhale the scent of another dog’s marking. This is true from the species swimming in the deep oceans to those running around our cities to parasitic wasps.
The other point of the parable—the true cautionary note—is that we’re often so wedded to our perception of reality that we have difficulty letting go of it. Each man is certain that he understands the totality of what an elephant is, that he is experiencing all there is to experience. Our umwelt, almost by definition, is all-encompassing. This is why, in some versions of the story, the men fight over who is right. The idea that another person—or another species—might have a wholly different sense of the world can seem nonsensical, wrong and a threat to us.
Your dog’s reality
This brings us back to our companion dogs. They have their own rich umwelt. They perceive and respond to a world, a reality, that is different than humans.
I experience this almost daily while working at my desk. Toby will be sleeping at my feet. It’s quiet, no sounds that I can hear except distant traffic. Suddenly, he jumps up and starts barking (and because he’s Toby, howling). He is sensing—perceiving—a sound, a smell, a motion that I can’t. After a few minutes, he does a couple of circles around my feet and lies down again.
I have no idea what he is reacting to. In my reality, everything is fine. In his reality, danger is present. So, as you walk your dog, take the time to notice what they notice. It’s a different walk! Be careful not to fall into the trap of the blind men—thinking that what we perceive is all that there is, the “truth.” It’s not. Rather, be amazed at the complexity of cognition. As a dog buries their snout in a bush, and all life goes about its business, wonder at the many realities that exist.
Hersch Wilson is the author of Dog Lessons: Learning the Important Stuff from Our Best Friends.. In addition to being an author, Wilson has also worked as a dancer, a pilot, a soccer coach and a leadership consultant. In 2022, he retired after 33 years as a volunteer assistant chief with the Santa Fe County Fire Department. His book Firefighter Zen: A Field Guide to Thriving in Tough Times was published in 2020 and won numerous awards. Visit him at www.herschwilson.com.
Excerpted from the book Dog Lessons: Learning the Important Stuff from Our Best Friends ©2023 by
Hersch Wilson. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.
imagens: Depositphotos
