All animals are subjects too

[Magical Realist]

Every animal lives inside its own unique version of reality based on its specific template of sensory abilities. This is called that animal's "umwelt":

An umwelt is the unique, subjective sensory world and perceptual experience that a specific organism or species inhabits. Coined from the German word for "environment" or "surroundings" by biologist Jakob von Uexküll, it describes how different creatures in the same physical space experience entirely different realities based on their unique physical senses and brain functions.

Key Aspects of the Concept

Subjective Universe: Every living creature filters the objective physical world through its own sensory organs.

Functional Circle: Organisms continuously sense signals from their surroundings, react to them, and change their behavior based on that feedback loop.

Species Differences: Two animals can share the same space—like a dog and a human in a garden—yet experience vastly different worlds due to contrasting senses like smell, hearing, or sight.

Examples in Nature

Ticks: Rely almost entirely on temperature, the smell of sweat (butyric acid), and touch rather than sight or hearing to find a host.

Mosquitoes: Males detect the specific pitch of a female's wing vibrations, a sound completely imperceptible to humans.

Bats and Fish: Navigate using air-compression sound waves (echolocation) or weak electrical fields instead of relying strictly on visual light."

Thus it is that animals live inside and interact with their own filtered version of their environment much as we do ourselves. This feedback loop between the animal's umwelt and how they respond to implies an iterative evolution of the animal and its umwelt. The prototypical beginnings of selfness and privacy rooted in this inherently perspectival nature of embodied sentience. Selfness and subjectivity then as situational and relational instead of some inherent and in-itself property of the body. Embodiment itself an effect of one's subjective and iteratively generated environment. Our collectively-shared human umwelt as Heidegger's Dasien of being-in-the world. The possible foundation for a pragmatic and functionalist interpretation of consciousness instead of as an accurate/illusory representational simulation of the world

[C C]

Every animal lives inside its own unique version of reality based on its specific template of sensory abilities. This is called that animal's "umwelt": [...] Thus it is that animals live inside and interact with their own filtered version of their environment much as we do ourselves. This feedback loop between the animal's umwelt and how they respond to implies an iterative evolution of the animal and its umwelt. The prototypical beginnings of selfness and privacy rooted in this inherently perspectival nature of embodied sentience. Selfness and subjectivity then as situational and relational instead of some inherent and in-itself property of the body. Embodiment itself is an effect of one's subjective and iteratively generated environment. Our collectively shared human umwelt as Heidegger's Dasien of being-in-the-world. The possible foundation for a pragmatic and functionalist interpretation of consciousness instead of as an accurate/illusory representational simulation of the world

Now if the inclusive club of embodied cognition could be expanded to robots, autonomous vehicles, etc. Although receptive to microphone and camera inputs from many distances, AI is still kind of resting on a shelf and doesn't have a body interacting with its immediate environment.

[Magical Realist]

Every animal lives inside its own unique version of reality based on its specific template of sensory abilities. This is called that animal's "umwelt": [...] Thus it is that animals live inside and interact with their own filtered version of their environment much as we do ourselves. This feedback loop between the animal's umwelt and how they respond to implies an iterative evolution of the animal and its umwelt.  The prototypical beginnings of selfness and privacy rooted in this inherently perspectival nature of embodied sentience. Selfness and subjectivity then as situational and relational instead of some inherent and in-itself property of the body. Embodiment itself is an effect of one's subjective and iteratively generated environment. Our collectively shared human umwelt as Heidegger's Dasien of being-in-the-world. The possible foundation for a pragmatic and functionalist interpretation of consciousness instead of as an accurate/illusory representational simulation of the world

Now if the inclusive club of embodied cognition could be expanded to robots, autonomous vehicles, etc. Although receptive to microphone and camera inputs from many distances, AI is still kind of resting on a shelf and doesn't have a body interacting with its immediate environment.

It goes to Michael Polanyi's notion of "tacit knowledge" vs "explicit knowledge". That is, knowledge that cannot be reduced to a set of communicable propositions and rules, and knowledge that can be reduced to that. Hence his famous motto: “We can know more than we can tell”.

Much of our experience consists of ways of knowing that can only be acquired by being a body interacting with the world. Riding a bike. Jumping rope. Typing. Even speaking itself. It is the reason Hubert Dreyfuss back in the 1960's was, and it turns out justifiably so, so firmly skeptical of AI's alleged abilities to totally simulate human knowledge. Basing his ideas on Heidegger's notion of humans being essentially embedded as sentient agents in the world, he understood the limitations of any kind of consciousness that could count as as human that was itself disembodied and NOT in the world.

I myself agree wholeheartedly. AI will simply lack the necessary largely unconscious yet intuitively-accessed understanding that only comes from a being a physical body in a physical world. French philosopher M Merleau-Ponty would concur, essentially showing how our whole notion of being subjective beings inherently and discretely conscious is wrong and that we are in fact rooted on our dynamic relational experience of already being engaged with the world:

“The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. ”― Maurice Merleau-Ponty