We have arrived at a curious possibility.
A being can be responsive to its environment without representing what it encounters.
This sounds almost contradictory.
How can something respond to a possibility if it does not, in some sense, recognise that possibility?
Perhaps because recognition is not required.
A plant grows towards light.
Its roots grow around obstacles.
Its leaves open and close in response to changing conditions.
We can describe these processes in increasingly sophisticated terms. We can speak of sensing, detecting, signalling, regulating and responding.
But none of those descriptions requires us to imagine that the plant has formed an internal representation of what is happening.
The plant need not know what light is.
It need not identify the obstacle.
It need not formulate a plan.
Something simpler is happening.
The organisation of the plant makes certain environmental differences consequential to what it can do.
The environment changes.
The plant changes.
The possibilities available to the plant change with it.
There is no message hidden in the light.
There is no instruction written into the stone.
There is no invitation waiting to be understood.
And yet the relation is real.
This gives us a useful distinction between being responsive to something and interpreting something.
We often move too quickly from the first to the second.
A thermostat responds to temperature. That does not mean that it understands temperature.
A vine responds to a support. That does not mean that it represents the support as something to climb.
An immune system responds to molecular structures. That does not require a little interpreter inside the organism reading molecular messages.
The response can be built into the organisation of the system itself.
This is important because otherwise we are tempted to place meaning wherever there is systematic sensitivity.
But systematic sensitivity is not yet meaning.
Something can make a difference to a system without being a sign for that system.
Something can alter what an organism can do without telling it what to do.
Something can be relevant without being represented.
The distinction may seem almost pedantic.
It is anything but.
For if we fail to make it, we risk turning the entire natural world into a population of miniature interpreters.
The plant becomes "reading" the light.
The bacterium becomes "decoding" the chemical gradient.
The animal becomes "interpreting" every environmental difference.
And eventually the language becomes so generous that almost any physical interaction can be redescribed as communication.
But then we have lost the very distinction between physical interaction and meaning that we set out to understand.
The world can be structured.
An organism can be organised.
The two can enter into relations that change what is possible.
None of this requires meaning.
Perhaps this is what it means to say that there is a world before meaning.
Not a world devoid of structure.
Not a world devoid of consequence.
Not even a world devoid of relations.
A world in which things can make a difference without that difference being a message.
That is a much stranger world than the old picture of a meaningless universe.
It is not empty.
It is full of possibilities.
But those possibilities do not yet have to be about anything.
And perhaps that is the crucial step.
Meaning is not simply the existence of a difference.
It is not even the existence of a difference that matters to an organised being.
Meaning requires something more.
We are not yet ready to say exactly what that something is.
But we can now see why the question matters.
For somewhere between a plant turning towards light and an animal seeing a place as somewhere to go, something changes.
The world has not changed into a world of meanings.
The organism has not necessarily acquired a little inner theatre in which meanings are displayed.
Rather, the relation between organism and possibility has become more deeply mediated.
And that may be where our next question lies.
What happens when possibility becomes something an organism can perceive?
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