We have now followed life from sensitivity to orientation, and from orientation to valence.
An organism does not merely encounter differences. Some differences matter to it. Some possibilities sustain it, others threaten it. Its activity is organised accordingly.
But is that enough for experience?
Here we reach the point at which explanations of consciousness often seem to divide.
One approach says that nothing in physical description seems to contain the fact that an experience occurs. We can describe the nervous system, its activity and its interactions with the environment, yet still ask:
Why is there something it is like to be this organism?
The familiar answer is to introduce phenomenal character, or qualia.
But that move leaves us with the very problem we have been examining. If experience requires an additional phenomenal ingredient, we have not explained how it belongs to the natural world. We have simply named the thing whose existence was in question.
Perhaps we should approach the transition differently.
The organism we have been describing is already more than a collection of physical events. It is an organised process with a history, a boundary, a metabolism, a repertoire of sensitivities and a continuing relation to its environment.
Its surroundings matter to it because of what it is.
Its activity is oriented because of what it needs.
Its world has valence because of the possibilities available to it.
As organisation becomes more complex, these relations can become increasingly integrated. Sensory systems interact with memory, prediction, bodily regulation, action and one another. The organism does not merely respond to isolated stimuli. It maintains an ongoing relation with a changing environment.
At some point in this history, there may be something it is like to be such a system.
But notice what has happened to the question.
We are no longer asking how a physical process produces a second thing called experience.
We are asking how a particular kind of organised physical process comes to have a first-person mode of existence.
That is a different question.
It may still be a very difficult one.
Indeed, we should resist the temptation to pretend otherwise.
We have not demonstrated that every sufficiently integrated organism is conscious. We have not established a precise threshold at which experience begins. Nor have we shown that biological organisation alone is sufficient for consciousness.
But we may have removed one unnecessary obstacle.
Experience need not be conceived as an additional object inhabiting the organism.
The organism itself is the experiencing system.
There is no need to imagine an inner spectator receiving the organism's sensory reports. The system's sensing, regulating, remembering, anticipating and acting are already parts of one continuously organised process.
The perspective belongs to the organisation.
This also changes the significance of the phrase what it is like.
It need not refer to a mysterious property added to an experience. It can describe the particular way an organism's world is available to that organism, given its organisation and history.
A bat's world is not a human world with an extra private glow attached to it.
It is a world encountered through the capacities and constraints of a bat.
A human's experience of the world is similarly shaped by the particular organisation of a human organism.
The differences between perspectives are therefore real without requiring separate phenomenal substances.
This brings us back to a distinction from our earlier discussion.
Mattering comes before meaning.
And perhaps something similar is true of experience.
Biological significance does not automatically become consciousness. But consciousness, if it has a natural history, cannot have appeared in a world completely devoid of the relations from which it could develop.
Before there could be experience, there had to be organisms for which things mattered.
Before there could be a conscious perspective, there had to be systems capable of being oriented within an environment.
The mystery, then, may not be how consciousness suddenly enters an otherwise finished physical universe.
It may be how nature gradually produces forms of organisation for which a world can become present as their world.
We have not answered that question.
But we have changed where the question begins.
And that may be the most important step so far.
The next question follows naturally.
If an organism can have a world without requiring an inner witness, what kind of self is it that has that world?
Perhaps the self is not something the organism possesses.
Perhaps it is the continuity through which its activity becomes its own.
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