We began with a simple thought.
Nothing happens without difference.
But by the end of our journey, the thought no longer seems simple.
The world is full of differences.
Yet differences do not all do the same thing.
Some alter physical processes.
Some constrain what can happen.
Some matter to living systems.
Some become perceptually available.
Some indicate.
Some become signs.
Some acquire meaning.
Some become concepts through which still other differences become consequential.
There is therefore no single way in which a difference makes a difference.
There are worlds within worlds.
A temperature difference can alter the state of water.
For a plant, a temperature difference can affect growth.
For an animal, it can become perceptually significant.
For a scientist, it can become a measurement.
For a community, it can become evidence of climate change.
The physical difference has not disappeared at any point.
But neither has it remained the same kind of difference.
Its consequences have multiplied.
This suggests that reality is not divided neatly into separate domains.
The physical, the biological, the perceptual, the social and the conceptual are not different universes.
They are different organisations of relations.
A physical difference can enter into a living process.
A living process can generate sensitivities.
Sensitivities can support indications.
Indications can become signs.
Signs can participate in meaning.
Meanings can become concepts.
Concepts can become practices.
Practices can alter the world in which new differences arise.
The direction is not one-way.
It is a circulation.
And this means that later forms do not simply replace earlier ones.
Meaning does not abolish mattering.
Concepts do not abolish perception.
Signs do not abolish indication.
Biology does not abolish physics.
The same difference can participate in several orders at once.
A sound is a physical event.
It may become a signal.
It may become a word.
It may become an argument.
It may become a memory.
The sound has not ceased to be physical.
But its possibilities have changed.
Perhaps this is the central lesson.
A difference does not acquire a new significance by leaving one world behind and entering another.
It acquires new possibilities by entering new relations.
And relations have histories.
The footprint has a history.
The animal has a history.
The practice of tracking has a history.
The concept of evidence has a history.
Each history changes what the difference can do.
This is why possibilities have histories too.
What can happen now depends partly upon what has already happened.
A distinction once introduced can become a category.
A category can become an institution.
An institution can become part of the environment.
The environment can then make new differences available.
The world we encounter is therefore partly inherited.
Not only its rocks and rivers.
Not only its organisms.
But its paths, categories, practices, signs and concepts.
We inherit landscapes of possibility.
And we alter them.
This is where the question of mattering becomes especially interesting.
We have learned that not every consequence is mattering.
Something matters when a difference becomes significant within the continuation or organisation of a living system.
But human worlds add another layer.
Through signs and concepts, we can make differences matter to one another.
We can decide that a distinction is important.
We can organise institutions around it.
We can teach it.
Record it.
Measure it.
Argue about it.
We can even discover that the distinctions through which we have organised our world are no longer adequate to the differences we encounter.
Then the conceptual landscape itself can change.
A new distinction can open possibilities that were previously difficult to see.
An old distinction can become a constraint.
A neglected difference can become consequential.
The world can appear different without having become a different physical world.
This is perhaps why we should be suspicious of both extremes.
The first says that meaning is already everywhere, waiting to be discovered in the physical world.
The second says that meaning is something minds simply impose upon an otherwise indifferent reality.
Our journey suggests something stranger.
The world gives us differences.
Organisms enter into relations with them.
Life makes some differences matter.
Sensitivity makes some differences available for differential response.
Indication makes some differences informative.
Signs make some differences stand for others.
Meaning makes those differences available for shared construal.
Concepts organise the resulting field of distinctions.
And through action, those distinctions can become part of the world itself.
Nothing has been added from outside.
Nothing was secretly present from the beginning.
Something has become possible.
That may be the deepest continuity running through everything we have explored.
The world does not begin with meanings.
It begins with differences.
But differences can enter into relations.
Relations can become organised.
Organisation can become sensitive.
Sensitivity can become signification.
Signification can become meaning.
Meaning can become conceptual organisation.
And conceptual organisation can alter the conditions under which future differences occur.
The process has no obvious starting point.
Nor does it have a final form.
Every achieved organisation becomes part of the conditions for something else.
Every distinction opens some possibilities and closes others.
Every new possibility can generate new differences.
Every new difference can begin another history.
Perhaps, then, the world is not best imagined as a collection of things with properties.
Nor as a blank field upon which significance is later projected.
Perhaps it is better understood as a history of differences becoming consequential.
Some differences vanish without a trace.
Some redirect a river.
Some sustain a life.
Some guide an organism.
Some leave a footprint.
Some become signs.
Some become words.
Some become concepts.
And some concepts eventually change what a world is capable of being.
We began by asking:
When does a difference make a difference?
Perhaps we can now answer.
A difference makes a difference whenever it enters into a relation that changes what can happen next.
But that answer contains a world of possibilities.
Because what can happen next depends upon what kind of relation has been formed.
And relations themselves can become transformed.
So perhaps the better question is not simply:
When does a difference make a difference?
It is:
What can a difference become?
That question has no final answer.
Fortunately.
For every answer is another difference.
And every difference may be the beginning of something new.
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