A difference can exist without mattering.
The temperature of a distant planet can change. A particle can move. A wave can pass through empty space.
Nothing needs to depend upon the difference.
But living systems are different.
For an organism, a difference in temperature can determine whether a protein functions. A difference in chemical concentration can determine whether a cell obtains energy. A difference in light can alter whether a plant can grow.
The difference is no longer merely present.
Something depends upon it.
This may be the point at which significance first appears.
We should be careful with the word.
Nothing has to notice the difference.
Nothing has to represent it.
Nothing has to experience it.
Mattering can be older than mind.
A difference matters when it enters into an organisation such that different states have different consequences for that organisation's continuation.
The distinction is subtle.
A molecule does not matter to a cell simply because the cell encounters it. It matters because what happens to that molecule can alter the organisation of processes upon which the cell depends.
The cell has therefore acquired a kind of sensitivity to difference.
Not necessarily sensory sensitivity.
Organisational sensitivity.
Its future depends upon distinctions in its surroundings and within itself.
This changes the character of the world.
Before life, differences could have consequences.
With life, some differences acquire consequences for something that is organised to continue.
That creates a new kind of asymmetry.
The cell does not treat all possible states as equivalent.
Some states support its organisation.
Others disrupt it.
Some exchanges sustain it.
Others threaten it.
There is now, in the simplest possible sense, a distinction between what can happen and what can happen while this organisation continues.
That distinction is the beginning of value.
Value need not begin as preference.
It can begin as differential consequence.
A condition is valuable to an organism when its continuation depends upon that condition. A condition is harmful when it contributes to the breakdown of the organisation.
This is not yet meaning.
But it is already more than mere difference.
The world has acquired a new relational structure:
difference → consequence → dependence → mattering.
And mattering introduces direction.
If some differences support continuation and others undermine it, then the system's activity can become organised around maintaining particular conditions.
The organism begins to have something like a norm.
Not a rule written somewhere.
A condition of continuing to be what it is.
A cell membrane must maintain particular relations between inside and outside.
A metabolic system must maintain particular chemical conditions.
An organism must continually restore conditions that its own activity disrupts.
Life is therefore characterised by a peculiar circularity:
what the organism needs in order to continue is continually threatened by the very processes through which it continues.
It must eat because metabolism consumes resources.
It must breathe because respiration changes its internal chemistry.
It must repair itself because activity produces damage.
It must regulate itself because living processes continually push conditions away from those required for continued organisation.
Mattering is therefore not an occasional feature of life.
It is woven into its persistence.
This gives us a different way of understanding the environment.
The environment is not simply a collection of external causes.
It contains differences that can support, disrupt or transform an organism's organisation.
The same physical event can therefore have radically different significance for different systems.
A drop in temperature is merely a change in temperature.
For one organism it may be harmless.
For another it may be fatal.
The difference does not carry its significance in isolation.
Significance is relational.
It belongs to the relation between an event and the organisation for which the event has consequences.
This is why the emergence of life marks such an important transition in natural history.
The universe already contained difference.
It already contained causal consequence.
But now there are systems for which consequences can be good or bad for the continuation of the system itself.
That is a radically new kind of relation.
The world has begun to contain not only events, but stakes.
And once there are stakes, a further possibility opens.
A system for which some differences matter can begin to respond selectively to them.
It can regulate.
It can compensate.
It can move.
It can grow.
It can alter its surroundings.
In other words, mattering can begin to generate action.
Which brings the two series quietly back together.
The Emergence of Agency began by asking when something first has a stake.
The Emergence of Significance has now reached the same threshold from the opposite direction.
We began with difference.
Difference became distinction.
Distinction became organised persistence.
And organised persistence made some differences consequential for itself.
The universe has reached a remarkable point:
a difference can now matter because something exists for which it makes a difference.
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