An organism can be oriented by its environment.
But orientation can become more than simple discrimination.
Some possibilities are favourable. Others are harmful. Some lead towards nourishment, safety or reproduction. Others lead towards damage, deprivation or death.
The world begins to acquire valence.
The term can sound psychological, but its roots are biological.
Sugar can be attractive to an organism because it can be metabolised. A toxin can be avoided because it threatens the organism's organisation. Warmth can be beneficial in one context and dangerous in another.
Nothing in the sugar, toxin or warmth possesses a universal label saying good or bad.
Valence arises from the relation between environmental possibilities and the needs of a living system.
This is why the same thing can have different valence for different organisms—or even for the same organism at different times.
Water can be life-sustaining to a dehydrated animal and irrelevant to one that has just drunk. A temperature that is comfortable in one circumstance can become dangerous in another.
Valence is therefore not simply a property of the world.
Nor is it merely a private feeling added by the organism.
It belongs to the relation between organism and environment.
This takes us a step further than sensing.
Sensing allows an organism to distinguish differences.
Valence differentiates those differences according to their significance for the organism.
The environment is no longer simply there. It is structured by possibilities:
something to approach;
something to avoid;
something to consume;
something to shelter from;
something to investigate;
something that can safely be ignored.
A world begins to have meaning for action, even though it does not yet have symbolic meaning.
This distinction matters.
We use meaning in several different senses. A chemical signal can mean something to an organism in the sense that it indicates a condition to which the organism should respond. A human word means something within a shared semiotic system.
These are not the same phenomenon.
The first belongs to biological significance. The second belongs to meaning proper.
Perhaps it is better, for the moment, to say that the organism's world has acquired significance.
Something matters, and it matters in a particular way.
This gives us a possible foundation for understanding perspective.
A perspective is not simply a location from which the world is viewed. It is a way in which the world is differentiated according to the possibilities it presents to a particular form of life.
From the outside, we can describe an organism's environment in physical terms.
From the standpoint of the organism's organisation, that same environment is structured by what can sustain, damage, attract, repel, enable or constrain its activity.
Nothing mysterious has been added.
Yet something genuinely new has emerged.
Nature now contains systems for which the difference between one condition and another is not merely a difference in physical state.
It is a difference in what can happen to them.
And this brings us close to a question we have so far avoided.
When does such a biologically significant world become an experienced world?
We should be careful here.
It would be easy to say that valence is experience, and thereby declare the problem solved by changing the vocabulary.
But that would simply recreate the mistake we examined in The Trouble with Qualia.
The existence of biological significance does not by itself establish consciousness.
What it does establish is something more modest—and perhaps more useful.
Before there can be a conscious perspective, there may have to be a biological system for which the world already has a perspective-shaped structure: some things matter, some do not; some possibilities invite action, others constrain it.
The organism has not yet necessarily become a witness to its world.
But its world has begun to be organised around it.
The next question is whether, and how, this orientation can become experience.
That is where the emergence of perspective becomes inseparable from the problem of consciousness.
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