Pilot Waves and Quantum Fields in a Relational Cosmos

🌀 Two Visions of Potential

In modern physics, two compelling notions describe how reality might be shaped before it is observed:

• Quantum Field Theory (QFT) tells us that particles are not fundamental, but are excitations of an underlying field that stretches across space. The field is the potential; the particle is its instance.

• Bohmian Mechanics offers a different idea: particles have definite trajectories, but are guided by a nonlocal pilot wave—an evolving structure that encodes the entire experimental context.

Each of these theories presents a picture of potential that is more than mere abstraction—it’s a map of how actuality might emerge.

But what if we take a further step, and interpret both the field and the pilot wave relationally? What if they are not things but structures of meaning potential—not properties of the universe, but ways the universe is made meaningful?

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🌌 Fields and Waves as Relational Meaning Potentials

In a relational cosmology, the universe is not built from isolated particles or immutable fields—it is made up of instances that emerge from potential through acts of construal. A meaner, through experience, selects from among many potentialities to actualise a particular unfolding.

From this perspective:

• The quantum field becomes a universal meaning potential—a structured system of possibilities from which meanings (particles, interactions, processes) may be drawn. Like a lexicogrammar in language, it defines what may be said before anything is said.

• The pilot wave, in contrast, becomes an instantial configuration of meaning potential—not a general field, but a context-specific map that constrains how a particular trajectory may unfold. It is not a cause of motion, but a relational structure that shapes actualisation.

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🧭 The Pilot Wave as Evolving Constraint

Bohmian mechanics imagines the pilot wave as living in configuration space, evolving in response to the broader context. In relational terms, this becomes a kind of semantic landscape—a network of meanings that, in a given situation, are more or less likely to be actualised.

What emerges is not a deterministic path, but a pattern of affordance—a sense of what is possible, plausible, and meaningful given the relations that hold. The pilot wave does not push the particle; it expresses the relational constraints that shape what the particle can be.

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🌐 The Quantum Field as Distributed Grammar

Where the pilot wave offers an evolving map of local context, the quantum field offers a more general topology of potentiality. It is not confined to a particular configuration, but expresses what is possible in principle across the cosmos.

In this way, the field functions like a distributed grammar of existence—a system from which all particles and interactions are actualised. It is not spatially localised, but semantically structured. It is not observed directly, but inferred from its instantiations.

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🔄 A Unified View

This offers a natural reconciliation between the two perspectives:

The quantum field is the systemic meaning potential of the cosmos. The pilot wave is the instantial meaning potential that arises within a specific relational configuration.

Neither is observer-independent; both are actualised through construal. They are not hidden structures waiting to be discovered, but relational maps that emerge through participation in the world.

In this sense, both field and wave become tools of cosmic grammar: the field offers the full range of what may be meant, and the pilot wave guides the unfolding of what is meant here and now.