Contemporary theories typically treat significance as a derivative phenomenon emerging from biological adaptation, information processing, consciousness, or social interpretation. This paper investigates a more fundamental possibility. Rather than asking how significance arises within an already constituted world, it asks whether significance may be one of the conditions through which worldhood itself becomes possible. Building on previous work on worldhood, the paper argues that a world is not merely a collection of differences, structures, or informational states. A world emerges when some differences matter more than others. Existing physicalist, cognitive, and phenomenological accounts successfully explain how significance is organised, stabilised, or expressed, yet they appear to presuppose distinctions between what is relevant and what is irrelevant. Through a critical examination of these approaches and a thought experiment concerning a universe devoid of significance, the paper explores whether significance functions as a fundamental asymmetry underlying the emergence of habitable worlds. The central proposal is exploratory rather than doctrinal. It suggests that significance may occupy a deeper position within reality than is commonly assumed, potentially preceding both consciousness and matter as a condition for world-formation. If correct, significance would not be a late product of worldhood but one of the organising principles through which worlds become possible in the first place.
Erik Tönsberg (Mon,) studied this question.