Work in progress.
One way of looking at the nature of reality is that of exploring the manifold of possible experiences. A tree, a coral reef, and a geode all explore different branches of the possible experience space in much the same way that a person can learn the piano or eat a donut. Whether the exploration is conscious, or like water rolling down a hill to form a river, doesn’t matter if we’re trying to understand the shape of the manifold.
A critical component of this is the continuous evolution of the manifold – every effect within the space changes the space itself.