What Counts as Seeing

The senses as a topic really leans into that because of how important imagination is for understanding them. Light is electromagnetic radiation. Smells are just small molecules drifting through air and water. Sound is just pressure waves. It’s not actually obvious that we should be able to sense any of these things, let alone then transform them in... See more

Comparing and contrasting that tendency to make generalizations can very easily devalue the experiences of humans who sense the world in very different ways.

things don’t have to be better than us to be extraordinary. I really wanted the writing to capture this feeling of nature as both being kind of goofy at times but also deeply wondrous.

When we don’t have the words or when our words are overly broad, we run into misconceptions.

most humans don’t really realize how interdependent we are to other organisms. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, bugs—there is still this binary thinking of these organisms as good or bad, as clean or dirty, which really obscures the reality.

On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.

Many people knew this before, but the last three years have hammered home the fact that we cannot protect things that we don’t empathize with. If we don’t care about the value of other lives, whether human or animal, then we won’t be motivated to protect those lives.

So much of the way knowledge is produced within an academy is very exclusive and inaccessible to so many people with not just different senses, but just to different walks of life. And that’s across every field. It’s such a loss, I think, about our understanding of the natural world.

An Immense World argues that the world around us is deep and richer than we know because we are confined by the constraints of our own sensors. Other animals operate under different constraints and so perceive a very different world than what we are familiar with. And even everyday things, a street or a plant or a featureless body of water, are ric... See more

It’s a slightly limiting concept. It means all of us are kind of constrained and trapped by the confines of our own senses. But it also is wonderfully expansive because it means that nothing can do everything.