The Emergence of Perspective: VII. The Self That Has a World

If there is a world for an organism, there is also an organism for which that world matters.

But what is this self?

The obvious answer is to imagine something inside the organism that owns its experiences.

I see the tree.

I feel the pain.

I remember yesterday.

There seems to be an I behind these experiences, the one to whom they belong.

But we have already encountered the difficulty with this picture.

If the organism contains an inner subject who observes its experiences, then we have simply moved the problem one step inward. What observes the inner subject?

The alternative is to look at the organism itself.

A living organism has continuity.

It changes constantly, but it does not change arbitrarily. Its present activity arises from its previous condition and contributes to its future condition. Its metabolism, bodily regulation, memories, learned responses and ongoing interactions form an extended history.

The organism is therefore not a fixed thing.

It is a continuing process.

This continuity matters because the organism's world is organised around that continuing process.

Food matters because this organism must continue to metabolise.

Danger matters because this organism can be damaged.

A remembered place matters because this organism has been there before.

A future possibility matters because this organism can act towards it.

The self that has a world is therefore not an additional entity standing behind the organism.

It is the organism's continuity as a centre of activity and significance.

This helps explain why selfhood can be both remarkably stable and constantly changing.

The body changes.

Memories change.

Beliefs change.

Skills are acquired and lost.

Cells are replaced.

Yet there is enough continuity for the organism to remain recognisably the same participant in its world.

Identity here is not the persistence of an unchanging substance.

It is the persistence of an organisation through change.

This also gives us a more useful way of thinking about the first-person character of experience.

Experience is not private because it occurs inside a private container.

It is particular because it belongs to a particular history of organisation.

No two organisms occupy exactly the same relation to the world because no two have exactly the same capacities, histories, needs and possibilities.

Perspective is therefore neither an objective view from nowhere nor a mysterious inner picture.

It is the world as encountered from within a particular form of life.

And as organisms become more complex, the continuity of the self can become more elaborate.

An organism can retain traces of previous encounters. It can anticipate what may happen next. It can compare present conditions with previous ones. It can alter its behaviour according to what it has learned.

The present is no longer isolated.

Past, present and possible future become integrated into one ongoing process.

At this point, the organism's world becomes more than a field of immediate biological possibilities.

It becomes a world that can be remembered, anticipated and navigated.

That does not yet give us symbolic meaning.

A remembered danger need not be represented by a word. An anticipated event need not be expressed as a proposition.

But something important has happened.

The organism can now carry its world with it through time.

And perhaps this is the deeper sense in which a self has a world.

It is not that a self first exists and then acquires a world.

The self and its world emerge together through the continuing organisation of the organism's relation to its environment.

A self is a centre because things matter to it.

A world is a world because it matters to a self.

Neither needs to be added as a separate thing.

There is, however, another transformation still to come.

So far, the significance of the organism's world has been biological.

But organisms do not remain alone.

They encounter other organisms. They coordinate their activities. They respond to one another. They begin to use differences in their environments as signals.

Eventually, some of those signals can become signs within shared systems.

The world can begin not merely to matter.

It can begin to mean.

That is where meaning enters the world.