Jakob Johann von Uexküll

The botanist Johannes Reinke, who coined the term theoretical biology in 1901 to differentiate it from empirical biology, was himself a proponent of the revived philosophy of neo-vitalism.

Jakob Johann von Uexküll's theoretical biology, published in 1920, was to a large extent also a philosophical work.

Best known for introducing the notion of Umwelt, Uexküll was one of the pioneers of the field of biosemiotics, which studies communication within and between living organisms in terms of signs and codes conveying distinct interpretable meanings.

Biosemiotics emphasizes that an organism doesn't respond indiscriminately to the physical world, since only certain signals from its environment have a biological significance for it.

For each species, there is a range of wavelengths of light, frequencies of sound, odors, and tastes that are relevant and meaningful to it, and that it can interpret and respond to.

He even walks into...

I mean, I mean, he refers to von Uexküll about, and the notion of Umwelt and an Innenwelt, a surround world and an inner world, which to me, as soon as you agree that there is such a thing as an inner world of a bat, unless you want to go and take Nagel's point in saying, "Ah, because there's an inner world that's an ex- inner world of a bat, there's a what it's like to be a bat that you don't have any access to, and therefore, there is consciousness, and that's the proof of consciousness." That's the part that Dennett won't go for.

But the notion that there is a inner world for a bat, that isn't a crazy one for Dennett.

Yeah.

He says...

So before this, he's talking about, this is towards the end of the what is it like to be a bat, and he brings up language.

This is after the reference to von Uexküll, and, you know, and he brings up Wittgenstein.

You know, he says, he quotes Wittgenstein, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.