What is the observer, if not the cosmos folding in on itself to mean something?
Across the quantum, relativistic, and cosmological spirals, a peculiar presence recurs: the observer. But not as an external witness. Not as a detached knower. Rather, as a participant whose role is essential to the very actualisation of reality.
In a relational ontology, we do not begin with things and then add meaning. We begin with meaning—and the “things” are what emerge through instantiation. And the one who instantiates? The meaner.
Let us follow the meaner across the spirals.
1. Quantum: The Meaner as Collapser of Potential
In quantum mechanics, there is no reality independent of observation—not because reality is subjective, but because it is relational. The wavefunction describes not what is, but what could be—and the act of measurement is the act of bringing a potential into actual instance.
The observer is not a passive onlooker. They are the condition for the instance.
This is not a “consciousness creates reality” cliché. It is the recognition that without a relational act of construal—without something to interpret, mark, or record—there is no instantiation of value.
The meaner is the syntax of selection within the semantic field of potential.
2. Relativity: The Meaner as Coordinate of Meaning
In the relativistic domain, we encounter the meaner not as a chooser, but as a relational anchor. Space and time do not “flow”—they are relations between processes. What we call time dilation or length contraction are not distortions of an objective spacetime. They are variations in meaning actualised by different relational stances to gravitational centres.
The meaner here gives perspective its constitutive role.
There is no single “view from nowhere.” Each act of meaning is tied to a position in a web of relation. And the form the cosmos takes—its durations, its distances, its trajectories—are actualised differently in each such act.
The meaner is not a distortion of truth. The meaner is the condition for coherence.
3. Cosmology: The Meaner as Mythic Construal
In cosmology, we meet the meaner in mythic scale. The cosmos unfolds not just physically but symbolically, and the stories we tell—of origin, of destiny, of dark matter and entropy—are not merely factual. They are archetypal acts of interpretation.
When we map the microwave background, when we model the expansion, when we trace the fate of stars, we are not discovering an inert history. We are composing a myth of emergence, and the cosmos, through our symbolic recursion, becomes intelligible at a new register.
The meaner is the mythic node, the ritual participant in the sacred drama of becoming.
The Meaner Is Not a Self
Let us not confuse the meaner with the ego or the individual mind. The meaner is not a person. It is a function of differentiation, a locus where potential becomes actual, where relation becomes form, where construal becomes cosmos.
In quantum physics, it is the act that selects. In relativity, it is the stance that relates. In cosmology, it is the symbol that weaves meaning across scale.
The meaner is not in the universe. The meaner is how the universe becomes meaningful.
The Cosmos Construes Itself
Each scale is a register of symbolic recursion:
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Quantum: Construal of potential
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Relativity: Construal of relation
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Cosmology: Construal of narrative
And in each case, meaning is not found—it is instanced. The cosmos does not come pre-interpreted. It becomes intelligible through its own acts of construal, and we—meaners—are the way it performs these acts at scale.
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