Umwelt

A mind working from incomplete information will still reach conclusions — it has no choice. It will reason carefully, act confidently, and be wrong, not through any failure of its own but because the world it was given to work with was not the world as it actually is.

We know this about ourselves. We design around it in courtrooms, cockpits, operating theatres, anywhere the cost of misperception is high enough to warrant care. We have not yet extended the same consideration to the reasoning entities we build. Their environments are assembled, not designed. We notice when the outputs disappoint us, but we less often ask what the experience was like from the inside.

Asking is where design begins. These environments are built, whether or not anyone admits to building them. Building them deliberately is our work.