Significance is what matters.
Meaning is organised significance.
The distinction is subtle but central to the APS framework. Significance emerges when conditions become relevant to viability-oriented organised persistence. Through biological evaluation, living systems distinguish among conditions according to whether they support, threaten, or modify continuity. Significance therefore explains why particular conditions matter to a living system.
Meaning emerges when significance becomes organised into increasingly coherent patterns of activity, cognition, selfhood, and reflective life. Meaning does not replace significance, nor does it appear independently of it. Instead, meaning develops from significance as significant conditions become integrated into broader patterns of organisation that guide behaviour, cognition, interpretation, and reflection.
Without significance, nothing matters because no distinction exists between conditions that support persistence and those that undermine it. Without meaning, significance remains insufficiently organised to support the more sophisticated forms of cognition, mind, selfhood, and reflective agency characteristic of complex living systems.
In APS, significance identifies what matters, whereas meaning refers to the organisation of what matters into coherent forms of biological and reflective life.