An Immense World

Ed Yong’s An Immense World explores how animals perceive realities radically different from our own. Through scent, vibration, magnetism, and light, nonhuman species inhabit sensory worlds humans can barely imagine.

For American Cyborg, October expanded the idea of intelligence beyond language and abstraction. Yong’s work dismantles the assumption that human perception is a universal baseline, revealing instead a pluralistic world composed of overlapping but distinct realities.

This reading resonated strongly with AI discourse. Just as animals experience the world through unfamiliar senses, machines process reality through logics humans do not share. October encouraged humility: intelligence does not converge toward a single form—it diversifies.