If a perspective belongs to an organism's particular way of being organised, then no two organisms need to have exactly the same perspective.
A bee does not inhabit the world as a human does.
An octopus does not inhabit it as a bee does.
A tree does not inhabit it as an octopus does.
Yet they do not therefore inhabit different universes.
There is one world, encountered through different forms of life.
This distinction matters because it is easy to move from the reality of perspective to a kind of solipsism.
If everything is experienced from somewhere, perhaps there is no world apart from the experience of each organism.
But that reverses the relation.
The world does not depend on any particular perspective for its existence. Perspectives arise because organisms have particular relations to a world that already exists.
A bee's world is shaped by what a bee can sense and do. An octopus's world is shaped by an entirely different organisation. A tree's relation to its environment is different again.
These differences are real.
But they are differences in relation, not separate worlds enclosed behind private walls.
Indeed, organisms constantly demonstrate this.
A flower can be part of the world of a bee and the world of a human at the same time, though it has different significance within each. A predator can be food for one organism and danger for another. A fallen tree can be shelter for one species, a source of nutrients for another and an obstacle to a third.
The world does not have to choose between these perspectives.
It can sustain them all.
This is one reason perspective should not be understood as a picture inside an organism.
A picture would need to be compared with the world it represents.
But a perspective is a way of participating in the world.
The bee does not need an internal representation of the flower in order to pollinate it. The octopus does not need a detached model of the seabed before moving across it. The human does not need to step outside the world in order to describe it.
Perspective is situated activity.
And once organisms interact, perspectives can begin to affect one another.
The bee changes the flower.
The flower changes the bee.
Predator and prey alter one another's possibilities.
Organisms compete, cooperate, reproduce, communicate and transform their environments.
A world inhabited by many organisms is therefore not simply a collection of separate perspectives.
It is a relational ecology of perspectives.
This becomes even more significant when organisms become social.
One organism can respond to another's behaviour. Behaviour can become coordinated. Signals can be exchanged. Expectations can develop. Shared practices can emerge.
Eventually, with language, organisms can explicitly construe one another's perspectives.
I can ask what you see.
You can tell me what I have overlooked.
We can disagree about what something means.
We can imagine how the world looks from someone else's position.
Perspective can therefore become an object of reflection without ceasing to be situated.
This may be one of the great achievements of human language: not escaping perspective, but making perspective shareable and negotiable.
We never acquire a view from nowhere.
Instead, we can place different views into relation.
Science is a particularly powerful example.
Scientific inquiry does not eliminate the situated observer by magic. It develops practices for comparing observations, controlling conditions, reproducing results and coordinating descriptions across different observers.
The aim is not to create a perspective belonging to nobody.
It is to construct forms of knowledge in which perspectives can be brought into increasingly reliable relation with one another.
Objectivity, in this sense, need not mean the absence of perspective.
It can mean the disciplined coordination of perspectives.
This gives us a useful picture of the journey we have been following.
First there was a world in which differences simply occurred.
Then there were organisms for which differences mattered.
Some became sensitive and oriented within their environments.
Their worlds acquired valence.
More complex organisms developed increasingly integrated forms of experience and selfhood.
Social organisms began to coordinate their activities.
And eventually, with semiotic systems, perspectives could be shared, contested and transformed.
The result is not one perspective replacing all the others.
It is a world containing many ways of being related to it.
The universe has not become less real because it contains perspectives.
It has become richer.
There can be a world for a bee, a world for an octopus, a world for a tree and a world for a human without there being four worlds.
There can be many perspectives because there is something there to have perspectives on.
And this brings us back to where we began.
The universe did not need a witness.
But once nature produced living systems, something remarkable became possible.
There could be beings for whom the world mattered.
And once there were such beings, there could be beings for whom the world could be experienced, shared, interpreted and meant.
The final question is therefore not why the universe needed consciousness.
It is why nature became capable of producing creatures for whom there could be a world at all.
Perhaps the answer is not hidden in some additional ingredient called consciousness.
Perhaps it lies in the history of life itself.
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