The Within of Things

The within (le dedans) is Teilhard's term for the interior, experiential, subjective dimension that accompanies every level of organized complexity as its necessary complement. While the without (exterior, measurable properties) is accessible to scientific observation, the within is accessible only from inside—what it is like to be the thing in question. For humans, the within is the entirety of conscious experience; for animals, it is inferable from behavior; for simpler organisms, it is vanishingly faint but structurally present; for atoms, it is the minimal proto-experiential ground from which, across billions of years of accumulating complexity, conscious experience eventually emerges. This is not mysticism but an application of the continuity principle: if consciousness exists now, something corresponding to it must have existed in rudimentary form all along, or else consciousness springs from nothing at an arbitrary threshold—a claim violating scientific parsimony.