When Matter Began to Become Life

From the First Boundary to Body-Territory: How Life Began to Build a World It Could Feel

Perhaps it is impossible to understand the origin of life by starting only four billion years ago.

We can begin much closer.

Now.

You are reading this text from within a living body.

There is a temperature around you. Your heart continues working without asking permission. You breathe. Some parts of your body are resting against a surface. As you read, one word may provoke interest and another resistance.

Everything we call “the world” reaches us from this position.

This does not mean that consciousness invents mountains, bacteria, or stars. The world does not disappear when we close our eyes.

But what we live as reality is always a relation between something that happens and an organism capable of perceiving it.

Antonio and Hanna Damasio have proposed that homeostatic feelings — signals related to the state of the organism itself — played a fundamental role in the evolutionary emergence of consciousness. Alfredo Pereira Jr., through Triple-Aspect Monism, also starts from first-person experience to think together about material body, information, and feeling. (academic.oup.com)

So let us make an unusual move.

Before returning to the earliest life on Earth, let us return to the beginning of a single human organism.

Before There Was an “I,” Much Was Already Happening

A sperm cell is a living cell.

An oocyte is also a living cell.

They respond to chemical conditions, change cellular activity, and participate in highly sophisticated molecular interactions. Calcium signals, molecules surrounding the oocyte, and membrane proteins all participate in fertilization. Recent reviews describe precisely this molecular communication between sperm, the structures surrounding the oocyte, and the oocyte itself.

But we need an important boundary here.

We do not have evidence that sperm cells or oocytes have conscious experience.

Responding to an environment is not the same as feeling that environment in the way we do.

After fertilization, a zygote is formed. The parental genomes are reorganized, the embryo begins successive divisions, and its own genome gradually becomes more active. Recent studies reveal the enormous molecular complexity of this transition. (nature.com)

There is still no brain.

There is still no person telling itself:

“I am here.”

And yet there is:

boundary,

exchange,

energy,

molecular selection,

communication,

adjustment,

development.

Long before reflective consciousness exists, life is already continuously negotiating with what surrounds it.

Perhaps this is our first analogy for looking billions of years backward.

Not because embryonic development repeats the evolution of life. It does not.

But because it helps us notice something simple:

the “I” arrives much later than the relationship between organism and environment.

Before the First Cell, There May Also Have Been Many Bubbles

In Blog 1, we saw that matter can form structures without being alive.

This now becomes fundamental.

Lipid-like molecules can spontaneously form aggregates, micelles, and compartments. Autocatalytic reactions can produce new components. Chemical systems far from equilibrium can consume environmental energy and preserve their organization for some time.

None of these things, in isolation, necessarily deserves to be called life.

Recent origin-of-life research suggests that the major problem is not only explaining how amino acids, nucleotides, or lipids first appeared. Many such components can emerge under plausible prebiotic conditions.

A deeper challenge is understanding how different processes began to work together, forming systems able to maintain boundaries, use energy, preserve information, and eventually reproduce and evolve. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Imagine a small chemical bubble.

There is an inside.

There is an outside.

Some molecules enter more easily.

Others do not.

An internal reaction modifies the membrane itself.

Now the “outside” begins to have different consequences for the “inside.”

That may have been an enormous step.

Not because the bubble acquired a mind.

But because something resembling an extremely primitive biological question appeared:

what needs to keep happening so that this system does not disappear?

Perhaps the First Difference Between Life and Matter Was a Relationship

This brings us closer to an important tradition in biology and cognitive science: autonomy and enaction.

Researchers associated with enactive thinking, including Argentine scholar Ezequiel Di Paolo, argue that organisms do not passively receive a fully formed world. By maintaining their own organization and acting, they establish relations of relevance with their environment. What supports or threatens their continuation begins to have biological meaning for that system, long before human language. (link.springer.com)

Again, we need to avoid a jump.

Biological meaning does not prove phenomenal consciousness.

A bacterium can move toward a nutrient and away from a harmful substance. We can speak of regulation, basal agency, or goal-directed behavior without automatically concluding that there is “someone inside” feeling hunger or fear.

Contemporary science still debates how far concepts such as cognition and agency should be extended to very simple forms of life. And when we reach plants, for example, a 2024 review concluded that there is currently insufficient evidence to affirm plant sentience. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Keeping that uncertainty open is part of Shared Agency.

We do not need to call everything conscious in order to recognize that life does extraordinary things.

The First Life Was Probably Not Alone

For a long time, we imagined the origin of life as the story of one pioneering cell appearing in isolation.

Recent findings make that picture less comfortable.

A 2024 reconstruction estimated that LUCA — the Last Universal Common Ancestor of present-day cellular life — may have lived about 4.2 billion years ago and already possessed a relatively complex cellular organization.

Even more interestingly, the authors concluded that LUCA probably was part of an ecosystem, rather than existing alone. (nature.com)

This does not mean LUCA was the first life.

It means almost the opposite.

By the time we can reconstruct this shared ancestor, ecological relationships were apparently already happening.

Perhaps life, from very early on, was less:

“I exist”

and more:

“we can continue within these relationships.”

Here Jiwasa begins to appear long before it becomes a human word — not as a scientific explanation for LUCA, but as a lens through which we can ask whether our modern insistence on searching for an isolated individual is always the best way to imagine living systems.

Life Began to Change What Was Changing It

Then something extraordinary happened.

Early organisms did not merely adapt to the planet.

They began transforming the planet.

Earth history shows continuous co-evolution between physical environments and microbial metabolism. Oceans, atmosphere, and microorganisms changed one another over billions of years. (nature.com)

Cyanobacteria developed oxygenic photosynthesis.

They used light, water, and carbon to sustain metabolic processes and released oxygen.

Over enormous timescales, this by-product of tiny organisms began transforming planetary chemistry. The Great Oxidation Event, around 2.4 billion years ago, profoundly changed the possibilities for life on Earth.

Notice the reversal.

Territory selects organisms.

Organisms transform territory.

The transformed territory then selects new possibilities for organisms.

Life → territory → life → territory.

Where does one begin and the other end?

Much Later, Plants Also Arrived With Companions

When plants began occupying terrestrial environments, once again we find a story that is less individual than our school diagrams often suggest.

Associations among plants, fungi, and microorganisms were important in the transition to life on land. Mycorrhizal fungi expanded plant access to nutrients and water, while plants provided carbon compounds to fungi. Recent reviews reinforce the importance of plant-microorganism interactions in terrestrialization.

It was not simply:

a plant growing on ready-made soil.

The plant changed the soil.

The fungus changed the plant.

Water changed both.

Microorganisms changed nutrients.

And the next generation encountered a territory already transformed by previous generations.

Life does not merely inhabit places.

It participates in constructing the conditions it will later encounter.

This Is Where Tekoha Can Expand Our Question

We do not want to use Tekoha as though a Guarani concept were a chemical theory of protocells.

That would reduce situated knowledge in order to make it fit inside a Western scientific category.

Danilo Silva Guimarães has drawn attention precisely to the risk of transforming knowledge produced in specific contexts into supposedly universal categories. (scielo.br)

In this series, Tekoha helps us in another direction.

It allows us to ask:

can any form of life be fully understood without the place and relationships that make its way of existing possible?

Ailton Krenak, in Ancestral Future, also displaces our idea of territory by inviting us to perceive rivers and other beings not merely as scenery or resources, but as participants in the continuity of life. (companhiadasletras.com.br)

So perhaps we can look again at that imaginary protocell.

The membrane seems to divide inside from outside.

But everything that keeps the “inside” alive comes from the “outside.”

Energy.

Molecules.

Temperature.

pH.

Water.

Chemical gradients.

The boundary exists.

But absolute independence never did.

And Perhaps Our Consciousness Still Works This Way

You also have a boundary.

Skin.

Membranes.

An immune system.

A name.

A history.

An “I.”

But while you read this text, the world continues to cross that boundary.

Light reaches the retina.

Sound may reach the ears.

Air enters the lungs.

Molecules from food become body.

Words alter expectations.

Expectations alter what we perceive.

BrainLatam has already proposed that the body learns before words, and that what we perceive does not arrive as a finished reality: experience is constructed through interaction among signals, bodily history, and what the organism has already learned to expect. (brainlatam.com)

This does not mean that each consciousness manufactures its own universe.

It means something simpler:

each organism encounters the planet from a position that no other organism occupies in exactly the same way.

Perhaps this is a useful provisional definition of First-Person Consciousness.

Not the center of the universe.

A living reference point within it.

From sperm and oocyte to fertilization, from embryo to birth, from child to adult and eventually to death, what that organism can perceive, feel, and do changes continuously.

Human consciousness itself appears to emerge gradually during neural development; recent work points to prereflective sensorimotor foundations during gestation, while the timing and nature of fetal consciousness remain open questions. (sciencedirect.com)

Perhaps, then, our question about the origin of life can also change.

Instead of only asking:

“When did the first living thing appear?”

we can ask:

when did a system emerge that could preserve a difference between itself and the world while remaining completely dependent on that world in order to continue existing?

From that point onward, perhaps there has never been life without territory.

Only different ways of living with it.

In the next blog, we will widen the lens again.

From the small membrane, we will move to the Amazon, Cerrado, Caatinga, Atlantic Forest, Pantanal, and Pampa.

Because if organisms transform their territories and territories transform organisms, a biome may be far more than an area outlined on a map.

It may be a living history of billions of relationships happening at once.

Main References

• Damasio, A.; Damasio, H. (2022). Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness. Brain. (academic.oup.com)

• Guimarães, D. S. (2022). A Tarefa Histórica da Psicologia Indígena diante dos 60 anos da Regulamentação da Psicologia no Brasil. Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão. (scielo.br)

• Krenak, A. (2022). Ancestral Future. Companhia das Letras. (companhiadasletras.com.br)

• Nogal, N. et al. (2023). The protometabolic nature of prebiotic chemistry. Chemical Society Reviews. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

• Howlett, M. G.; Fletcher, S. P. (2023). From autocatalysis to survival of the fittest in self-reproducing lipid systems. Nature Reviews Chemistry. (nature.com)

• Di Paolo, E. A.; Lawler, D.; Vaccari, A. P. (2023). Toward an Enactive Conception of Productive Practices. Philosophy & Technology. (link.springer.com)

• Pereira Jr., A. (2024). Qualiomics: The metaphysics of consciousness. Forum for Philosophical Studies. (ojs.acad-pub.com)

• Moody, E. R. R. et al. (2024). The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system. Nature Ecology & Evolution. (nature.com)

• Lyons, T. W. et al. (2024). Co-evolution of early Earth environments and microbial life. Nature Reviews Microbiology. (nature.com)

• Hansen, M. J. (2024). A critical review of plant sentience. Biology & Philosophy. (link.springer.com)

• Delafield-Butt, J.; Ciaunica, A. (2024). Sensorimotor foundations of self-consciousness in utero. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. (sciencedirect.com)