The Emergence of Significance II — When Difference Appeared

Before there were organisms, there were differences.

A region of space could be hotter than another. One concentration of matter could differ from another. A field could vary across a distance. Events could occur at different times.

Difference is therefore not something life invented.

But there is a difference between a difference existing and a difference becoming consequential.

A temperature gradient does not need an organism to exist. But once a gradient produces movement, chemical reaction or changing structure, the difference begins to participate in what happens next.

Difference has entered into causal history.

This matters because the universe is not made from sameness interrupted by occasional differences. Difference is continually generating further differences.

A difference in temperature can produce a difference in pressure. A difference in pressure can produce movement. Movement can produce another distribution of matter. That distribution can alter subsequent movement.

One difference becomes the condition for another.

We might therefore think of the physical world as a vast process of differences propagating through differences.

But this still does not give us significance.

A difference can have consequences without mattering to anything.

A rock heated by the sun changes. The change may affect its surroundings. Yet there is no obvious sense in which the rock has a stake in whether it becomes hotter or colder.

Something more interesting happens when differences become organised into a structure that can persist.

A whirlpool, for example, depends upon differences in the movement of water. Its existence is not independent of those differences; its identity is a pattern maintained through them.

The difference is no longer merely something that happens to the system.

It is part of what constitutes the system.

This is an important transition.

A persistent organisation can make some differences consequential for its own continuation.

The distinction between inside and outside is one example. Once a boundary exists, what crosses it can affect what happens within. Once chemical reactions become organised into a self-maintaining network, concentrations that would otherwise be merely physical variations can become conditions for maintaining that network.

At this point, difference begins to acquire a new kind of history.

The system does not simply undergo differences.

It becomes dependent upon certain differences and resistant to others.

That is a much more demanding form of organisation.

And it brings us surprisingly close to life without having to define life in advance.

A living system is not merely something in which differences occur. It is something whose continued existence depends upon maintaining particular relations among differences while exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings.

The crucial development, then, may not be the appearance of difference itself.

It may be the appearance of differences that participate in their own persistence.

This changes the meaning of a boundary.

Before organisation, there are differences across space.

After organisation, a difference can establish an inside and an outside, and thereby change the consequences of everything that crosses it.

The world has acquired local structure.

And once local structure exists, there can be something like a here.

Not yet a point of view. Not yet consciousness.

Simply a region of organised difference whose continuation depends upon what happens across its boundaries.

That may be the beginning of a much longer story.

For eventually some differences will not merely constitute a persistent organisation. They will make a difference to the continuation of that organisation.

Then difference will become mattering.

And the universe will contain something new:

not merely differences, but differences for which something depends upon the outcome.