To sense something is not necessarily to see it.
Indeed, sensing did not begin with eyes.
A bacterium can detect a chemical gradient. A plant can respond to the direction of light. A root can alter its growth in response to moisture. An animal can detect temperature, pressure or vibration.
None of this requires a picture of the world.
What sensing introduces is something more basic.
The organism becomes selectively responsive to differences in its environment.
This is an important development.
In the previous post, the organism became a centre: a living system organised around its own continuation. Now that organisation can become oriented.
A difference in the environment can alter what the organism does.
The chemical gradient is not simply present. It can guide movement. Light is not merely a physical event. It can alter growth. A vibration is not merely a change in pressure. It can trigger an appropriate response.
The organism is beginning to distinguish its surroundings through its own activity.
This is why sensing is not best understood as passive reception.
A sensor does not simply collect pieces of reality. It is part of an organised system whose structure determines which differences can be detected and what consequences those differences can have.
The same environment can therefore be sensed differently by different organisms.
A bat and a human do not simply receive different quantities of information about one identical world. Their different forms of organisation make different features of the environment available to them as possibilities for action.
A flower does not need to perceive ultraviolet patterns in the way a human perceives a coloured surface. A bee's sensory capacities are organised around a different way of navigating its environment.
There is no requirement that one of these perspectives be the complete one.
Each is shaped by a form of life.
This gives us another distinction.
An organism can be affected by its environment.
It can become sensitive to differences within it.
It can become oriented by those differences.
These are not yet synonymous with seeing, and none by itself establishes consciousness.
But something has changed.
The organism is no longer merely maintaining itself amid whatever happens to occur around it. Its activities are increasingly structured by distinctions within its environment.
Its world is acquiring contours.
Some directions lead towards what sustains it. Others lead away from it. Some changes are worth responding to; others can be ignored.
Sensing therefore begins to transform the environment from a collection of events into a field of possibilities for action.
This may be the deeper significance of perception.
The organism does not first construct an internal copy of the world and then act upon it. Its sensory capacities participate directly in its engagement with the world.
To sense is, in the most basic sense, to be able to be oriented by what matters.
Seeing is a highly elaborate form of this capacity.
It brings spatial organisation, integration, memory, prediction and action into increasingly complex relationships. But the eye should not obscure the much older biological achievement from which seeing eventually develops.
Before there was seeing, there was sensitivity.
Before there was a picture of the world, there was orientation within it.
And once an organism can be oriented by what matters, another possibility appears.
The differences it encounters need not merely guide its activity.
They can acquire different values for it.
The world can begin to feel, in the broadest biological sense, favourable or hostile.
That is where valence enters the story.
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