The Many Lenses of Consciousness

"Recent research suggests that consciousness can be understood as the process of experiencing information through unique filters or "lenses." This ability extends beyond humans to animals, plants, and even bacteria. The Universal Nature of Awareness This lens metaphor helps explain how different organisms perceive reality differently. Just as optical lenses bend light to create images, biological systems filter and focus information to create consciousness."

"For example, a raptor's visual system acts like a telephoto lens, detecting movement at great distances. Harris's hawks can detect colored objects at twice the distance humans can. Similarly, a dog's olfactory system perceives scents that are undetectable to humans, allowing them to gather information about their current and historical environment. Because of their exceptional ability to smell, dogs can be trained to detect drugs, explosives, and even illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, or infectious diseases."

"Even plants demonstrate the ability to perceive sensory information about their environment. Research has shown that plants' roots can detect moisture at a distance, and some species even respond to the sounds of approaching pollinators or vibrations from herbivorous insects. This suggests that awareness exists wherever life has evolved the ability to detect information in the environment. Bacteria can detect differences in chemical concentrations. They also possess a form of short-term memory."

Consciousness can be understood as the process of experiencing information through organism-specific filters or 'lenses.' Different biological systems filter and focus environmental information to produce distinct perceptual worlds: raptors possess telephoto-like vision that detects distant colored objects, dogs' olfactory systems reveal chemical histories, plants detect moisture and respond to pollinator sounds or insect vibrations, and bacteria sense chemical gradients and retain short-term information. Human perceptual lenses can be altered by psychedelics, meditation, and flow states, changing sensory processing and subjective experience. Awareness appears wherever life has evolved mechanisms to detect and integrate environmental information.

Read at Psychology Today