The world existed before anyone experienced it.
There were stars before there were eyes to see them.
There were oceans before anything swam in them.
There was light before anything could see.
Nothing about this requires explanation in terms of consciousness.
The universe does not need a witness in order to exist.
But something changed when life appeared.
Not the universe itself.
The relation between the universe and what existed within it.
A living organism is not merely another object among objects. It is organised around its own continued existence. Its surroundings can therefore make a difference to it in ways that they do not make a difference to a rock.
Some differences matter.
Some can be sensed.
Some can guide action.
Some possibilities become favourable or dangerous.
A world begins to acquire significance.
From there, increasingly complex forms of organisation make possible richer forms of orientation, integration, memory and anticipation. At some point in this history, there may be experience.
We should be careful about exactly how that transition occurs.
We have not discovered a precise boundary between non-experience and experience. Nor have we shown that biological organisation, simply by becoming sufficiently complex, must produce consciousness.
But perhaps we no longer need to imagine consciousness as an additional ingredient inserted into nature.
The organism itself can be the centre.
Its perspective can belong to its organisation.
Its experience can belong to its ongoing relation with its world.
Its self can be the continuity through which that relation unfolds.
And when organisms become social, their worlds can become shared. Signals can become signs. Biological significance can become social significance and eventually meaning.
The history is not a simple ladder.
Evolution does not proceed by ticking boxes marked mattering, sensing, experience, self and meaning. These capacities overlap, interact and develop in different ways.
But there is a direction worth noticing.
Nature begins with differences that simply occur.
Life introduces differences that matter.
Organisation produces centres of activity.
Sensitivity produces orientation.
Valence differentiates possibilities according to significance.
Experience, where it emerges, gives such organisation a first-person mode of existence.
Selfhood gives continuity to a centre that has a world.
Sociality allows worlds to intersect.
And semiotic systems allow significance to become meaning.
Nothing has been added to the universe at any particular step.
What changes is the organisation of relations within it.
This is perhaps the deepest lesson of the journey.
We began by asking how a world could exist for anything.
The answer was not to discover a mysterious object called a perspective.
A perspective is not something an organism possesses in addition to being an organism.
It is a way the organism is organised in relation to its world.
The same is true of the self.
The self is not a little entity hidden somewhere inside the organism, watching its experiences go by.
It is the continuity of the organism's participation in its world.
And perhaps experience should be approached in the same spirit.
We should not assume that there must be an extra phenomenal thing before there can be experience.
The existence of experience is not in doubt.
What remains difficult is understanding how nature comes to contain organised beings for whom there is a world.
That is a profound question.
But it is different from asking how a non-conscious universe somehow manufactures a second, phenomenal universe inside the heads of conscious beings.
The latter picture may have created some of the mystery it then asked us to explain.
The former begins with something we already know to be real:
living beings have worlds.
Not worlds separate from the universe.
Worlds within it.
Worlds structured by their capacities, histories, needs and possibilities.
And human beings add something extraordinary to this natural history.
We can wonder about our own perspective.
We can ask what it is like to be another creature.
We can describe our experiences.
We can invent concepts such as consciousness and qualia.
We can even become puzzled by the very fact that there is a world for us.
Perhaps that puzzlement is not evidence that consciousness is alien to nature.
Perhaps it is one of nature's achievements.
A piece of nature has become capable of asking what it is to be a piece of nature.
The world does not need a witness.
It never did.
But once living systems exist, there can be a world for them.
Once perspectives exist, there can be worlds encountered in different ways.
Once social and semiotic systems exist, those worlds can be shared, interpreted and transformed.
And once beings capable of reflection exist, the universe can contain something that asks what any of this means.
The world does not need a witness.
But once living systems exist, there can be a world for them.
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