A difference can matter without yet being a distinction.
A change may have consequences simply because of what happens to be connected to what. But a distinction does something more.
It makes a difference available as a difference.
For this to happen, the difference must have some stability. It must be possible for something to count as different again.
This does not require a mind to recognise it.
A biological system can respond differently to conditions that matter to it. In doing so, it does not merely undergo different events. Its organisation incorporates a difference into what can happen next.
The distinction is beginning to acquire a history.
This is important because identity does not require permanence.
Something can remain distinguishable while continually changing. A living organism is not the same collection of matter from one moment to the next, yet its organisation persists sufficiently for differences to matter to it as the same organism.
Perhaps, then, distinction is not the opposite of change.
It is stability within change.
A distinction persists when a difference can be carried forward into further relations and consequences.
And once this happens, something new becomes possible.
A difference that can recur as a distinction can enter into an organised pattern of further differences.
This is the beginning of a world in which something can be this rather than that; where one thing can be distinguished from another; where what happens now can matter again later.
We are still some distance from meaning.
But the conditions for meaning are beginning to appear.
For meaning will require not merely differences that matter, but differences that can be organised as distinctions within a continuing system.
And that raises the next question:
What happens when distinctions themselves become capable of being organised?
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