A difference becomes consequential when it changes what can happen.
But when does it become a constraint?
A locked door gives us an easy example. The relation between the door and the room has changed. Passage is no longer available.
The door has not merely become a different object.
It has changed the field of possible action.
This is what a constraint does.
It does not necessarily prevent everything. It distinguishes between what remains possible and what no longer is.
And this is important, because we often think of constraint as the opposite of possibility.
But without constraint, possibility has no structure.
If absolutely anything could happen, there would be no meaningful distinction between one possible future and another. Possibility would become indistinguishable from mere imagination.
A constraint gives possibility a shape.
The road constrains where the journey can go, but in doing so it makes a journey possible. The grammar of a language constrains what can be said, but those constraints make an enormous range of meanings available. The structure of a physical system constrains its behaviour, while simultaneously providing the conditions for that behaviour to occur.
Constraint, then, is not simply restriction.
It is differentiation among futures.
Some remain open. Others close.
This is why relations matter so much. A relation can establish a constraint without anything having to act as an external force.
The structure itself can determine what follows.
We saw this in the black hole. Inside the event horizon, the geometry does not need to push an object towards the singularity. The causal structure has changed so that every future-directed causal path leads towards decreasing radius.
The constraint is geometrical.
And because it is geometrical, it is also a constraint on becoming.
What can happen next depends upon the relations that constitute the present.
This gives us a different way of thinking about the world.
The present is not simply a collection of things and their properties. It is an organisation of relations that opens some futures and closes others.
Possibility therefore does not float freely above reality.
It is structured by constraint.
And constraint is not something imposed upon possibility from outside.
It is one of the ways possibility comes into being.
Which leaves us with a curious inversion.
We usually imagine possibility first, and constraint second: many things might happen, until something prevents them.
Perhaps the order is closer to the reverse.
The possible may therefore begin not with freedom from constraint, but with constraint itself.
And that raises the next question:
If possibility is structured by the present, what exactly do we mean by “possible”?
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