In this final post of the series, we turn to quantum mechanics (QM), not to reject its established mathematical formalism or predictive power, but to reframe its ontological implications within a semiotic framework. As we argued in previous posts, the metaphysical assumptions traditionally built into physical theories often go unquestioned, particularly the commitment to a material reality independent of meaning. Here, we challenge that commitment by reconstructing QM on the basis that reality is meaning, and meaning is instantiated by observers through semiotic systems.
1. Quantum Mechanics Without Materialism
In mainstream interpretations, quantum mechanics describes a world of particles and fields governed by probabilistic laws. Observers appear only at the margins, collapsing wavefunctions by measuring, but not themselves part of the ontology. The wavefunction is often taken to describe a potential physical state, awaiting discovery or collapse.
But if, as we've proposed, meaning is the stuff of reality, then the wavefunction does not represent an underlying physical potential. It represents a semiotic potential: the range of possible meaning instances that may be instantiated by an observer within a particular interpretive system. The wavefunction, then, is not waiting to be collapsed by measurement; it is waiting to be instantiated as meaning.
2. The Observer as a Semiotic System
In this view, the observer is not an incidental feature of the quantum formalism, but a central player. Not because the observer has special causal powers, but because all actualisation of meaning requires a meaning-maker. The observer is a semiotic system capable of transforming experience into meaning. Measurement is a semiotic act: it is the instantiation of meaning from potential.
Crucially, this does not mean that reality is subjective, or that "anything goes". Semiotic systems are structured, constrained by the histories and collectives in which they evolve. But the quantum state only becomes actual within such a system: the observer does not merely record reality, but co-creates it through semiotic instantiation.
3. Reinterpreting Collapse
Standard accounts of wavefunction collapse often imagine a pre-existing material world being revealed by measurement. In a semiotic ontology, collapse is not the unveiling of an independent state, but the selection of one meaning instance from among many potentials. Once instantiated, that instance has the status of reality, but not because it was material all along. It is real because it is actualised as meaning.
From this perspective, the paradoxes of QM dissolve. Schrödinger's cat is neither alive nor dead until observed, not because the cat lacks a material state, but because the question of its aliveness or deadness is uninstantiated until a meaning system selects a position within its interpretive resources. The cat is a potential meaning, not a hidden material.
4. Potentials and Systems
This reframing also clarifies the relation between potential and instance. The wavefunction is a model of what might be instantiated, given a particular semiotic system. When a measurement is made, that system instantiates one of the potential meanings. This instantiation feeds back into the system, affecting future probabilities of selection. The process is dynamic: each act of instantiation reshapes the meaning potential from which future instances will emerge.
Here we see a strong parallel with systemic functional linguistics (SFL): each text (instance) affects the probabilities in the meaning potential (system), creating a feedback loop through the cline of instantiation. This suggests that quantum mechanics, when reconceived semiotically, offers not a mystery but a model of co-creation.
5. Co-Creating Reality
In this model, there is no reality "behind" the meanings we instantiate. There is only the ever-evolving structure of meaning potential, shaped and reshaped by acts of semiosis. We do not discover reality; we enact it.
This is not a denial of science, but a reframing of its metaphysical foundations. The formal structures of QM remain intact; what changes is our understanding of what they mean. We move from a metaphysics of matter to a metaphysics of meaning, from a world of things to a world of signs.
The observer, then, is not an intruder in the quantum world, but its co-creator. Reality is not what exists apart from us, but what comes into being through us, as we instantiate the potentials of our semiotic systems.
With this semiotic reconstruction of both relativity and quantum mechanics, we suggest a new philosophical foundation for physics: one that takes seriously the role of meaning in the constitution of reality. Rather than seeking a single unifying theory of everything in material terms, we might begin to ask: what are the meaning potentials we live within, and how do we actualise them as worlds?
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