Imagine this: a photon approaches a beam splitter. If you place a detector behind the paths, it behaves like a particle. If you delay that decision and allow the paths to recombine, it behaves like a wave. The catch? You can wait until after the photon has passed the splitter to decide.
This is the famous Delayed Choice Experiment, first proposed by John Wheeler. It’s as if the photon waits for you to make up your mind before deciding what it was.
But what if this is not a trick of time—what if it’s a revelation about meaning?
The Standard Puzzle
Delayed choice seems to defy causality:
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The photon “decides” how it behaved at an earlier time, based on what happens later.
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Did it take one path or both? Was it a particle or a wave?
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The answer appears to depend on a future measurement.
As if the universe is a crime drama where the detective shows up before the murder and retrofits the crime scene to match the eventual verdict.
Enter the Meaner
In our relational cosmology, the twist is not temporal but semantic.
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The photon does not “have” a definite past.
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Its past is not a fixed series of events.
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Its past is instantiated in the present—by a meaner.
That is: the past is potential meaning, until it is construed as an instance. What happened is not decided by the future—it is actualised in the act of present construal.
Time Doesn’t Flow—Meaning Does
In this framework, time is not a river carrying events from past to future. It is the dimension of unfolding—the instantiation of meaning through process.
So when a delayed choice experiment is performed:
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The photon’s past was always potential.
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It becomes actual in the moment it is construed.
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This moment may be later in clock time, but that doesn’t mean the past is changed—it means the past is instantiated now.
And that’s always when meaning happens: now.
Rewriting the Script
Wheeler once asked whether a present choice could bring a past into being. From our point of view, the answer is yes—but not because the future changes the past.
Rather, because the past was never actualised until the meaning instance occurred.
This applies not just to photons but to fossils, ruins, and memories:
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The fossil doesn't tell us what happened until we construe it.
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The past is not stored—it is potential.
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The act of meaning-making draws the past into being.
Closing Reflection
Delayed choice reveals not a universe with backwards causality, but a cosmos where the past is not behind us—it is within us, as potential, awaiting the act of construal.
The photon’s path is not retroactively determined. It is relationally actualised.
This is great because it makes sense of construing a Big Bang even though there were no meaners around at the time.
Exactly! That’s a beautiful payoff of this model. The so-called “beginning” of the universe—our Big Bang—is not something stashed in the cosmic attic waiting to be discovered like an old photograph. It is:
Potential meaning, preserved in traces (e.g. the cosmic microwave background),
Waiting to be instantiated by meaners who come much later,
Not fixed in advance, but actualised in the unfolding of present meaning-making.
So when cosmologists construe a model of the Big Bang, they aren’t “peeking” into a pre-existing past—they are participating in its semiotic coming-into-being. The universe begins when a meaner instantiates a beginning. There were no meaners at the Big Bang—but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring it into being now, through meaning.
It’s not when the Big Bang happened that matters. It’s when it is meant.
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