Each organism is a universe unto itself, perceiving a world of its own making.— Jakob von Uexküll
In the previous posts we dissolved the classical architecture of consciousness: there is no inner theatre, no hidden observer, no substantial self. Phenomena arise through construal within relational systems capable of sustaining perspectives. Consciousness, in other words, is the actualisation of experience from relational configurations, not a mysterious property of matter.
Once the hard problem disappears, a new horizon opens: the diversity of experience. If relational systems generate perspectives, and perspectives give rise to phenomena, then each relational system produces a distinct field of experience. The world as a human experiences it is only one of countless possible worlds actualised by living systems.
The Concept of Umwelt
The biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt to describe the phenomenal world of an organism — the meaningful environment that emerges from the organism’s particular capacities and relations.
A tick, for instance, does not inhabit a world of trees, sunlight, or air in the way humans do. Its universe is defined by the stimuli that matter for its survival: the smell of a mammal’s skin, the warmth of its body, the texture of fur. The tick’s world is small but complete; it does not require our notions of “reality” to function.
Similarly, a bat navigates a world structured around echolocation. Its auditory maps and fine-grained temporal patterns are the actualised phenomena of its Umwelt. What is invisible to us — the echoes bouncing through space — constitutes the immediate and vivid reality for the bat.
Each organism, then, lives in a phenomenal world uniquely actualised by its relational capacities.
Multiplicity Without Fragmentation
At first, this might sound like radical solipsism. If every organism inhabits its own Umwelt, does this mean there is no shared reality?
Not at all. The multiplicity of consciousness does not imply isolation. Relational systems can overlap, interact, and constrain one another. A predator and prey share a physical environment, yet each construes it differently. Communication, perception, and action emerge through interpenetrating relational fields, generating structured overlaps without collapsing the uniqueness of each organism’s perspective.
Multiplicity does not erase relationality; it amplifies it.
From Other Animals to Humans
Humans, too, are creatures of multiple Umwelten. Our sensory capacities, cognitive patterns, cultural practices, and symbolic systems create relational configurations that generate a rich field of phenomena.
Language, in particular, magnifies our capacity to construe possibilities. Words allow us to inhabit not just one world, but countless hypothetical worlds — imagined scenarios, abstract concepts, and shared narratives. Consciousness is therefore not a monolith, but a dynamic spectrum of perspectives actualised through relational organisation.
This explains why human experience is so diverse and flexible. Yet it also situates human consciousness within the broader continuity of life, rather than as an exceptional property mysteriously emerging from matter.
Consciousness as Relational Multiplicity
Relational ontology, together with the concept of Umwelt, reframes the question of consciousness:
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Not: How does matter produce experience?
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But: How do relational systems organise fields of actualised phenomena?
Each field is a phenomenal world; each perspective, a mode of actualisation. Consciousness is inherently multiple, distributed, and perspectival. The richness of life is mirrored in the multiplicity of worlds that different forms of life inhabit.
Towards a New Appreciation
Recognising the multiplicity of consciousness transforms our understanding of experience. Human consciousness is not the sole arbiter of reality. It is one relationally sustained perspective among many.
Other forms of life — from the tick to the bat, from the dolphin to the crow — actualise their own phenomenal worlds, governed by their capacities, relational networks, and ways of construal.
To study consciousness is not to find a single universal essence. It is to explore the kaleidoscope of perspectives that life itself generates, a field of actualised possibilities that extends far beyond our own experience.
What Comes Next
Having established the multiplicity of phenomenal worlds, the final post in this series will examine human self-consciousness and symbolic systems. We will explore how language, culture, and sociality expand our perspectives, create recursive forms of construal, and allow humans to navigate a universe of possible worlds — while remaining a single relational system embedded in the wider multiplicity of life.
Consciousness is no longer mysterious. It is relational, perspectival, and profoundly plural.
The stage is now set to understand the emergence of human self-consciousness as one remarkable actualisation among many.
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