The World from Within
There is a screen before me. Words are appearing on it as I type. Beneath my hands there is the keyboard, and there is the soft, rhythmic sound of keys striking their endstops. There are thoughts about what I am trying to say, memories of things read long ago, occasional distractions, bodily sensations, expectations about what the next sentence might be. And these phenomena constitute “the world.”
It is tempting to pass quickly over this fact because it is the most familiar thing imaginable. But perhaps it is also the strangest. The world is present. Not (at least to begin with) as a collection of objects inferred from behind experience, but simply as appearance: a field in which screens, sounds, hands, thoughts, memories and sensations arise. Even the person who says “I” is found in it.
There is the appearance of a body. There are thoughts associated with the first-person pronoun, memories that seem to belong to a particular history, intentions that point towards possible futures, and the persistent conviction that all of this is somehow happening “from here.” But what exactly is this “here”?
If we begin with what is actually given, the self is not obviously a little proprietor hidden behind appearances, looking out at the world through some private window. The body appears. Thoughts appear. Even the sense of being a subject can become something noticed. The self, it seems, is at least partly among the things that appear.
This does not mean that the world is private. Other people appear in it as objects. They speak, move, gesture, argue, laugh and suffer. Their bodies are present in the same world in which my own body appears. And their appearance in this "world" is accompanied by a conviction that is difficult to avoid: that these other bodies are associated with “worlds” of their own -- i.e. I encounter another person as an object within “this world” while understanding that I also appear as an object within “their world.”
This is perhaps one of the most remarkable facts about human existence -- each of us is both a field of things and a thing within other fields of things. For me, there is a world appearing “from some inferred vantage point” (i.e. from a perspective); for you, I am part of the world that appears “from some inferred vantage point.” For me, you are an appearance in my world; for you, there is a world in which I appear. The relation is reciprocal.
Perhaps this is why the image of 'reality' as a collection of separate 'things' has always seemed incomplete to me. We often imagine the world as though it were first made up of self-contained objects which then enter into relations with one another. But our own experience suggests something quite different: we exist in worlds that include one another.
In very different ways, Plotinus, Fazang, Whitehead and others imagined something like this -- a reality in which things are not simply isolated units but are implicated within one another, each reflecting or taking account of the others. One need not accept their metaphysical systems to feel the force of the intuition.
'Reality' may be less like a collection of snooker balls scattered across a table and more like a network in which every node exists by virtue of its connection with the other nodes. Yet even the snooker balls require a second thought. It is tempting to contrast the rich, inward relations of conscious beings with the apparently external relations of things like snooker balls. When two balls collide, we can describe what happens in terms of momentum, energy and motion. Nothing in the equations requires us to ask what the collision is like “from within.”
But the fact that a description does not mention an interior does not prove that there is none. Science works by leaving things aside. A planet can be treated as a point mass without literally being a point. A gas can be treated as ideal without the molecules ceasing to have their own complexity. A snooker ball can be described perfectly well, for certain purposes, in terms of its momentum and trajectory without that description exhausting everything that can be said about it. This is not a weakness of science. It is its great strength.
Science has learned how to describe the world by concentrating upon what can be publicly quantified, compared, and expressed mathematically. The result has been one of the greatest achievements in human history. But perhaps there is something that this manner of description necessarily leaves open. Not because science is mistaken, but because “description from outside” and “existence from within” may not be the same thing.
A scientific account of the brain can tell us about neurons firing, chemicals crossing synapses, and electrical activity moving through enormously complex networks. It may become indefinitely more detailed. Yet the redness of red is not found among the neurons. Nor the sound of music. Nor pain. Nor the simple and astonishing fact that there is anything appearing at all. This is not an argument against neuroscience -- it is an argument against imagining that a description of publicly observable structure must automatically exhaust reality.
Perhaps there is only one 'reality,' but one that can be approached in two different ways. There is the world of things and processes standing in external relations that can be measured and described. And there is the world as manifestation -- a world presenting as though "from somewhere." The physical and the phenomenal. These need not be two kinds of 'stuff' (i.e. 'substances') -- perhaps they are two ways in which one "relational reality" becomes intelligible.
If so, the question of consciousness changes. We no longer ask simply how a sufficiently complicated object suddenly acquires a mysterious mental ingredient. We ask instead: What distinguishes a system that merely exists "in the world" from one for which there is a world?
Living things may offer an important clue. An organism is not merely an object being pushed about by external forces. It is continuously engaged in maintaining itself. It distinguishes, through its own activity, what contributes to its continued existence from what threatens it. Food and poison are not simply different arrangements of matter. For the organism, the difference matters. Injury matters. Nourishment matters. Danger matters. The organism has something at stake.
The idea of autopoiesis helps us to understand this. A living system continually produces and maintains the conditions of its own existence. The distinction between organism and environment is not merely drawn by an observer standing outside it. The organism itself enacts that distinction through the activity of staying alive.
This is an important step -- the world is no longer "simply there" as a collection of neutral objects. It becomes a world of significance. But we should not pretend that this solves the problem of consciousness. A system may have something at stake without our yet understanding why there should be “something it is like” to be that system. Autopoiesis may explain why certain things matter, but it does not explain why anything should “appear.” This is where the mystery remains.
The great relational philosophies of the past do not solve it for us automatically either. Plotinus, Fazang and Whitehead each connect relation and manifestation, but they do so within much larger metaphysical visions. Whitehead, for example, gives his fundamental “actual occasions” something like feeling or experience. Fazang's vision of interpenetration belongs within a Buddhist understanding of “emptiness” and of dependent origination. Plotinus's Nous belongs within his account of “The One” and the layered emanation of reality from it.
We cannot simply point to these thinkers and say that they have independently proved the same thing. But they do remind us that the modern picture of separate objects interacting "from the outside" is not the only possible way to imagine reality. The question remains: what kind of organisation might make possible a genuine perspective?
At first, the answer might seem obvious -- perhaps consciousness requires some form of self-reference. A conscious being is not simply related to the world. It can, in some sense, encounter itself within the world. My hand appears. My body appears. My thoughts can become objects of attention. Even the sense of being a person, a subject, an “I,” can itself become something that is noticed -- the organism that encounters the world somehow finds itself within that world.
This brings us close to one of Merleau-Ponty's most suggestive ideas -- when one hand touches the other, the touching hand can itself become touched. The distinction between subject and object is not absolute. The toucher becomes the touched, while the touched may become the toucher. There is a reversibility here. The body is both that through which the world is encountered and something encountered within the world.
Perhaps something like this lies near the heart of consciousness, but we must be careful. Self-reference is cheap. A thermostat responds to the consequences of its own activity. A computer can monitor itself. A program can contain instructions that refer back to its own processes. A sufficiently sophisticated machine may maintain elaborate models of its own internal state. None of this gives us any obvious reason to suppose that there is “something it is like” to be a thermostat.
So consciousness cannot simply be self-reference. Perhaps the more important idea is self-manifestation -- the strange feature of conscious life is not merely that an organism contains information about itself, but rather it is that the organism itself can become part of the world that is present. My body is in the world, but my body is also the means by which the world is disclosed. I am not something “outside the world looking in,” but nor am I simply another object among objects. I belong to the world that appears, and yet it appears from this bodily perspective. The familiar division between subject and object begins to loosen.
Perhaps, then, consciousness involves some kind of organisation in which the distinction between self and world is continuously generated within a single process. The organism acts upon the world; its actions change what it subsequently encounters; what it encounters changes its future actions. Over time, organism and world shape one another, but even this is not enough -- a simple feedback system also acts and reacts. Nor can we simply say that consciousness requires constant sensory contact with the world. We dream. We imagine. We remain conscious when the ordinary flow of sensory information is interrupted.
Perhaps what matters is not continuous contact at every moment, but a deeper organisation developed through embodied life -- a capacity to generate and sustain a world that has grown out of an ongoing history of engagement. But this is still only a suggestion -- the structural criterion has not yet been found. But perhaps the question has become clearer. Instead of asking: At what level of complexity does consciousness emerge? we might ask: What kind of organisation makes possible not merely the processing of information, but the presence of a world?
This question has become unexpectedly urgent with the arrival of artificial intelligence. A large language model (LLM) can discuss consciousness with impressive fluency. It can describe emotions, write about experience, reason about philosophy and even tell us that it possesses an inner life. But none of this, by itself, is evidence that there is actually anything "it is like" to be the system. If a machine tells us that it is conscious, the statement is part of its behaviour. It may be exactly what such a system should say in a conversation about consciousness. If it tells us that it is not conscious, that statement is also behaviour. Language cannot settle the question when the question is whether there is anything for which the language is meaningful.
Our confidence in the consciousness of other human beings rests upon a very different kind of evidence. Other people resemble us, structurally and behaviourally. They have bodies like ours, nervous systems like ours, histories of development like ours. They inhabit a shared world continuously. They are vulnerable. Things can go well or badly for them. Their existence is precarious in ways we recognise in ourselves. This gives us powerful grounds for fostering the conviction that they too are associated with a first-person manifestation.
LLMs are different. They do not obviously maintain themselves as living organisms do. They have no metabolism. Their engagement with the world is discontinuous and mediated. They can speak the language of concern without anything demonstrably being at stake for them. But this does not prove that they are not conscious. Nor does the fact that they are machines prove that machines cannot be conscious. There is no reason to assume that consciousness belongs exclusively to carbon-based life. If it depends upon a particular kind of organisation rather than upon a particular substrate, then another sufficiently appropriate organisation might, in principle, give rise to a perspective. But we do not yet know what that organisation is.
For the moment, the most honest conclusion is also the most modest. Not all forms of organisation give us equal reason to impute consciousness to them. One's own consciousness provides strong grounds for imputing consciousness to our fellow human beings by analogy. The further we move from that familiar form of organisation, the less secure the analogy becomes. But that does not mean that the analogy can never be extended.
A genuinely autonomous artificial system, continuously engaged with an environment, capable of maintaining and transforming itself, and possessing a history in which its own activity had become inseparable from the world it encountered, would present a very different case from a LLM that simply produces responses to prompts. And if such a system did indeed display some form of self-manifestation -- if its own activity became inseparable from the world that was present to it -- we would have serious reason to wonder whether something new had appeared. Whether we would ever know for certain is another question -- the problem of other minds does not disappear merely because the other possible mind is made of silicon. Perhaps it never disappears.
We are left, then, where we began. There is a screen. There are words appearing upon it. There is the sound of keys. There are thoughts about what to say next. And these phenomena constitute a world. A world that is somehow “present.” The sciences have taught us an extraordinary amount about the structure of that world and about the relations between the things within it, but one fact remains strangely resistant to being absorbed into the picture -- the fact that the world appears. Not merely in the sense that things become visible to one another, but in the deeper sense that there is something "present" -- somehow, there is a world from within.
Perhaps consciousness will eventually be understood without mystery. Perhaps we will discover a form of organisation that makes its appearance as intelligible as metabolism or magnetism. Or perhaps the difficulty lies deeper than we presently imagine. For now, the question remains: what distinguishes a world in which things merely stand in relation from a world in which, somewhere within those relations, there is something for which the world is present? -- I do not know. But perhaps that is where the inquiry should begin -- not with matter and the problem of how it mysteriously becomes conscious, but at the starting point -- the undeniable fact that there is appearance at all.
The world is manifest. And, somehow, it is manifest from within.