We have spent a long time asking how biological value can become social mattering and, eventually, meaning.
But perhaps we have been starting too far up the ladder.
Before there is society, there are organisms.
Before there are relationships, there are living systems whose own organisation makes some differences consequential and others not.
So let us begin again.
What can matter without relationship?
The single cell is enough
A bacterium has no society to belong to.
No language.
No nervous system.
No social identity.
Yet it is not indifferent to its environment.
It must maintain its organisation in changing conditions.
Nutrients become available or scarce.
Temperature and pH change.
Toxic substances appear.
Oxygen may become more or less available.
Bacteria possess regulatory systems that alter metabolism, growth and other cellular processes in response to such changes.
Nothing about this requires us to imagine a bacterium "knowing" what is happening.
The point is simpler.
Its organisation makes some differences consequential to it.
Chemotaxis gives us a particularly clear case
Consider chemotaxis.
Bacteria can detect changes in concentrations of chemical substances and bias their movement towards conditions containing beneficial compounds or away from harmful ones.
The bacterium does not need a representation of food as an object.
A chemical difference is detected.
A signalling pathway changes.
The flagellar motor changes its behaviour.
The bacterium's movement changes accordingly.
We should resist the temptation to call the chemical a sign.
It is more primitive than that.
There is no need for symbolic construal.
There is simply a difference that makes a difference to an organised living system.
Value before meaning
This is why Edelman's notion of biological value remains such a useful starting point.
Value need not be conscious preference.
It need not be represented.
It need not be named.
It is enough that the organisation of the organism differentiates between conditions according to their consequences for its continued activity.
In that sense:
value precedes meaning.
And perhaps, more fundamentally:
mattering precedes meaning — but not yet social mattering.
This last qualification is important.
We have been using mattering specifically for the social organisation of biological value.
So we need another term here.
Relational significance has not yet appeared
A bacterium can be value-sensitive without another organism becoming significant to it.
Its environment can affect it.
But that is not yet a relationship between participants.
The distinction we proposed before beginning this series therefore becomes useful:
biological value concerns what is differentially consequential for an organism's own organisation;
relational significance concerns the way another organised system becomes consequential to it;
social mattering begins when such relations become recurrently organised into something recognisably social.
At the bacterial starting point, we have the first of these.
We need not yet posit the other two.
The organism does not need a world of symbols
This also helps separate our project from the problem of meaning.
A bacterium can navigate chemical gradients without possessing a symbolic representation of its surroundings.
Indeed, chemotaxis is often described as navigation towards more favourable chemical conditions, and it can involve remarkably sensitive detection of changes against widely varying background concentrations.
The system is therefore capable of value-sensitive regulation without semiosis.
That is exactly what we want at the beginning of the series.
The boundary of the self matters
There is another important feature here.
For the moment, the value system and the organism coincide reasonably neatly.
The bacterium maintains its membrane, metabolism, internal chemistry and genetic machinery.
Conditions that support these processes support the organism's continuing organisation.
Conditions that disrupt them threaten it.
The boundary between:
the organism
and:
what matters to the organism
is therefore already enough to give us a primitive value landscape.
But it remains an individual landscape.
There is no social topology yet.
Even stress is still individual
Bacteria also possess sophisticated stress responses.
Nutrient limitation, oxidative stress, osmotic changes, temperature shifts and other challenges can trigger coordinated changes in cellular activity.
Again, we should not anthropomorphise this.
The point is not that a bacterium feels stressed.
It is that its organisation responds differently to conditions that threaten its functioning.
The distinction is crucial:
physiological significance is not psychological experience.
We can study value-sensitive organisation without deciding anything about consciousness.
What happens when another organism enters the picture?
Now the interesting problem begins.
A bacterium does not live in an empty world.
Other organisms are already there.
They may alter chemical conditions.
Consume resources.
Produce metabolites.
Create toxins.
Provide nutrients.
Form associations.
The environment is therefore already becoming relational.
But we should not call every ecological interaction social.
An organism can be profoundly affected by another organism without that other organism becoming a social participant.
The distinction matters.
From environment to relation
Suppose organism A alters a condition encountered by organism B.
If B responds because that condition affects its own value-sensitive organisation, we have a coupling.
If B's response then alters A's condition, a feedback loop appears.
Now:
A affects B → B affects A.
This is more than an organism and an inert environment.
It is the beginning of relational significance.
But even here, we should not rush to "social".
A recurrent interaction has to become organised in particular ways before that word earns its place.
The next step is signalling
This is where our earlier signal/sign distinction will become useful.
A difference generated by one organism can engage the value system of another.
At this stage, the signal is not yet a sign.
It does not need symbolic meaning.
It simply carries a consequence through the interaction.
Bacterial chemotaxis gives us the individual side of this story.
The next question is what happens when bacteria themselves begin producing signals that alter one another's organisation.
Then the mattering landscape will no longer belong entirely to isolated organisms.
It will begin to have a relational shape.
What we have established
We have deliberately started below society.
A bacterium can:
maintain its organisation;
distinguish among environmental conditions;
alter its activity in response;
move towards favourable conditions;
respond to conditions that threaten its functioning.
None of this requires:
language;
symbolic meaning;
social identity;
or even another organism.
This gives us our baseline:
biological value can exist without relationship.
And that gives us the question we need next.
What happens when another value-organised organism becomes part of the system?
When Organisms Become Significant to One Another
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