Cell phenomenology: The first phenomenon.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology December 1, 2015 H H Pattee
Phenomena arise from physical interactions detected by an organism, shaped by the organism's own structure and functional needs. The human mind-body problem is a special case of a broader subject-object problem, which at life's origin reduces to a symbol-matter problem. The first self-replicating unit, such as a cell, required a primitive symbol-matter distinction. All sensing and detection depend on a subject-object distinction called the epistemic cut, enabling populations of individuals to adapt through heritable variation by separating subjective phenomena from objective physical events.