A bird sees a branch.
But what does it see?
A collection of coloured surfaces? A certain arrangement of lines and angles? A physical object occupying a particular region of space?
Or does it see something more immediate?
A place to perch.
A place to land.
A route through the trees.
We tend to assume that perception gives us a picture of the world and that action comes afterwards.
First we see the thing.
Then we work out what it means.
Then we decide what to do.
But perhaps this gets the order wrong.
For a creature whose existence depends upon moving through an environment, perception may already be deeply entangled with possibility.
The bird does not need first to construct a neutral representation of the branch and then add the property perchable.
Its perceptual capacities have been shaped by its history as a living organism, including the ways in which its internal value systems have come to select some environmental differences as more significant than others.
Perception is therefore not simply a registration of whatever happens to be present.
The organism is selective.
It does not encounter an undifferentiated world and then discover that some things matter more than others. Its organisation already biases what can become salient to it.
The branch is there.
But the bird is organised to be sensitive to some of what the branch makes possible.
The possibility is not simply added to perception.
It may be part of what perception consists in.
This gives us a different way of thinking about seeing.
To see a cliff is not merely to register a vertical surface. For an animal capable of falling, the cliff is part of a landscape of possible movement.
To see an opening is not merely to register an absence of material. It may be to encounter a possible route.
To see a predator is not merely to detect a shape. It may be to encounter an altered field of possible action.
Perception, in such cases, seems less like making a copy of the world and more like finding one's way through its possibilities.
But this creates a problem.
If the bird sees the branch as a place to perch, have we now arrived at meaning?
Perhaps.
But perhaps not.
The word as is doing dangerous work here.
To say that the bird sees the branch as a perch sounds as though the bird has classified it, interpreted it or represented it as something.
That may be true in some cases.
But the behaviour itself does not establish it.
The bird's perceptual organisation may simply be sensitive to the structures that make landing and perching possible.
The distinction between perception and interpretation therefore remains important.
An organism can be perceptually organised around possibilities without necessarily representing those possibilities as concepts.
A possibility can become visible to a form of life without becoming a proposition in its mind.
This helps explain why different creatures inhabit different perceptual worlds.
A bat's environment is structured by possibilities available through echolocation.
A bee's environment includes patterns of light unavailable to us.
Our own perceptual world is shaped by the capacities, histories and value organisation of our bodies and nervous systems.
There is no single perceptual world which each species simply photographs from a different angle.
There are different ways in which organised beings can be responsive to the structures of a shared world.
And yet this does not mean that each creature lives in a private universe.
The branch is still there.
The gap is still there.
The predator is still there.
The possibilities are constrained by the world.
What differs is the organisation that makes some of those possibilities perceptually available.
Perhaps perception is therefore best understood neither as a picture of the world nor as a projection upon it.
It is a selective way of becoming sensitive to possibilities for action.
And this gives us a subtle transition.
Before perception, an organism can be responsive to environmental differences without those differences becoming anything it encounters as such.
With perception, some possibilities become available within the organism's ongoing engagement with its environment.
But something still seems to be missing.
A possibility that can be perceived is not yet necessarily a possibility that can be indicated.
A branch can be perceptually available as somewhere to land.
But a sound can indicate that the predator is nearby even when the predator itself cannot be seen.
Now the possibility is no longer simply encountered.
It can be mediated by something else.
And that is a remarkable development.
For the first time, something in the world can stand in for something that is not immediately present.
We have moved from possibility to indication.
And with that, we may be approaching the boundary we have been carefully avoiding.
The boundary of meaning.
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