Time as Meaning in Motion: From Construal to Ontology

In most traditions of thought, time is assumed to be a fixed and universal backdrop—an abstract container in which things happen. But what if time, rather than being a container, were a construct—a way of cutting across potential to produce the experience of unfolding? What if time was not something we move through, but something that moves through us, shaped and reshaped by the ways we construe meaning?

In this post, we want to explore this question by weaving together two strands: the richly elaborated construals of time in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), and the deeper ontological account offered by a relational perspective in which time is no longer a given, but a perspectival effect of meaning in motion.

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1. Time in Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Multifunctional Construal

SFL offers a powerful array of resources for understanding how language construes time—not as a singular phenomenon, but as a complex, multifunctional system of meanings. From this view, time is not "represented" in language, but enacted through choices made in grammar and semantics. Several key systems illustrate this point.

Metafunctional Time

Language construes time differently across each of the three metafunctions:

• Experiential time treats time as part of the world: when things happen, how long they last, how often they recur.

• Interpersonal time emerges in interaction: how speakers negotiate temporality relative to the "now" (e.g. tense, usuality, obligation).

• Textual time organises meaning across the unfolding of discourse: how the text structures its own temporality, whether through narrative ordering or thematic progression.

This reveals that there is no single temporal axis in language—only multiple orientations, each shaping a different slice of the temporal field.

Extent and Location

Two key circumstantial systems elaborate time further:

• Extent construes how far a process stretches through time (duration) or how often it recurs (frequency).

• Location situates the process in time—when it unfolds—but also includes metaphorical paths of temporal movement, such as beginnings, middles, and ends.

Time, here, is spatialised—measured, located, traversed—but all within the fabric of meaning.

Tense: Temporal Logic

Tense is not merely a reflection of past, present, or future. It defines a temporal reference point, which becomes the anchor for further logical relations. This allows for a complex layering of time—e.g. “She had been waiting” construes not just a past event, but one that began before another past reference point.

Tense turns time into a semantic logic of relation, rather than a timeline of absolute positions.

Phase: The Ontology of Becoming

Phase introduces a different kind of temporality—one that doesn’t just position events, but stages them:

• A process may be inceptive (just beginning), durative (ongoing), or conclusive (ending).

• Crucially, this system begins to speak not of time as background, but of becoming as process: the unfolding of something from potential into reality.

At its most suggestive, SFL itself notes that “at the deepest level, time-phase and reality-phase are the same thing.” Time here is not just a category—it is a trace of emergence.

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2. Time in Relational Ontology: Construal in Motion

While SFL describes how language construes time, relational ontology asks a more radical question:

What if time itself is nothing but a product of construal?

From this view, there is no universal "time" in which things unfold. Instead, what we experience as time is the result of perspectival cuts across a field of potential—a system of possible relations, meanings, and events. When we speak, act, perceive, or imagine, we make a cut: we bring something into being as an instance of meaning. And it is this act of instantiation—the construal of difference, motion, dependency—that is the experience of time.

Let’s now reinterpret the SFL notions through this ontological lens.

Metafunctional Time as Perspectival Cuts

The three metafunctions offer not distinct timelines, but three cuts through relational potential:

• Experiential construals produce time as externalised sequence—events “happening.”

• Interpersonal construals enact time as positioning within subjectivity—expectation, urgency, modality.

• Textual construals organise time as meaning in motion—how construal itself unfolds.

Time is not built into these dimensions—they are different ways in which construal temporalises relation.

Extent and Location as Modal Architecture

Duration, frequency, path, and position are not properties of time—they are modal construals of how meaning unfolds. A process that lasts "for three years" is not unfolding in time, but being construed as a temporally extended relation. Likewise, "by the end of the week" is not a fixed endpoint, but a construal of directionality within the logic of instantiation—the structuring of an instance as it emerges.

Tense as Projection of Potential

Tense doesn't encode time; it projects possible instances from a reference point within the unfolding of meaning. It allows the speaker to construe dependencies: what follows what, what precedes what, what might follow next. It is time as a logic of construal, not as a container for events.

Phase as Thresholds of Instantiation

Phase is not merely the temporal shape of a process (beginning, continuing, ending), but a semiotic construal of instantiation-in-motion. It tracks how an instance is staged from within a system of potential—not how something occurs in time, but how meaning comes into view through a perspectival cut.

The earlier insight that “time-phase and reality-phase are the same thing” aligns here: time is not a setting in which reality occurs. Rather, time is the construal of becoming, the cut through which reality takes shape as event.

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3. From Description to Explanation

SFL gives us a precise description of how time is construed in meaning; relational ontology provides an explanation of how these construals emerge:

SFL Time	Relational Reinterpretation
Metafunctional Time	Perspectives on unfolding potential
Extent and Location	Modal construals of unfolding and direction
Tense	Logical projection of interdependent instances
Phase	Semiotic staging of instantiation from potential
"Time-phase = reality-phase"	Ontological claim: time is the perspectival construal of becoming

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4. Conclusion: Time as Meaning in Motion

Rather than treating time as a fixed axis along which meaning travels, this perspective invites us to see time as the motion of meaning itself—a series of perspectival cuts across relational potential.

Language doesn't merely refer to time. It temporalises meaning. And when we move from tense to phase, from location to unfolding, from frequency to construal, what we are tracking is not time, but the becoming of meaning—the motion from potential to instance.

In this sense, time is not out there.

Time is in the construal.

Time is the very motion of becoming.

When Time Flies: Feeling, Meaning, and the Construal of Duration

In everyday life, we often say things like “time flew by”, “the hours dragged on”, or “the day just disappeared”. These aren’t statements about clocks, calendars, or relativity. They’re not “mistakes” in reasoning. They are patterned construals — ways in which we bring meaning to the experience of unfolding.

In a relational ontology, where reality is not composed of things but of processes and the relations that hold between them, these expressions are not trivial. They are semiotic enactments of how we live through time. And they do important meaning work.

Time as Actor, Time as Medium

When someone says “time dragged”, time is being construed metaphorically as an Actor in a material process — as if it has slowed itself down, stretched the moments thin. Similarly, when someone says “time flew”, time becomes a moving entity, speeding beyond the bounds of attention. These are experiential metaphors, compressing the relation between consciousness and event into the behaviour of “time” itself.

Yet in both cases, what’s being evaluated is not time per se, but the felt rhythm of a process: waiting, anticipating, enduring, enjoying. These metaphors are relational approximations of affect. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), they sit at the junction of the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions: experiential in how they construe the world, interpersonal in how they express stance or affect.

Not Relativistic, But Still Relational

It’s important not to confuse these expressions with relativistic construals of time in physics. Einsteinian time dilation arises from co-instantiating processes across different frames of reference. In contrast, “time flew” describes a shift in felt temporal density — how thickly or thinly experience seems to unfold.

But both are relational construals.

• Physics construes time’s unfolding as differential motion relative to spacetime topology.

• Consciousness construes time’s unfolding as affective density relative to the rhythms of attention.

Each is a valid mode of meaning within its system of value. Both take experience and construe it through relation — whether formal (as in physics) or lived (as in phenomenology).

Meaningful Time

A relational ontology does not divide these into “real” and “illusory”. Time is not a thing; it is a dimension of unfolding, and all construals of time — in physics, in grammar, in metaphor — are meaningful structures projected onto the relational field of experience.

So when time flies or drags, it tells us something not about the ticking of a clock, but about the structure of feeling as it unfolds. It shows that time, too, is part of the meaning we make.

2 Fields as Meaning Potentials

In our first post, we reimagined fields not as invisible substances, but as relational structures of potential — patterned affordances for participation. Now we dig deeper into this idea by aligning it with a powerful analogue from semiotics: meaning potential.

In systemic functional linguistics, meaning is not made by isolated words or sentences. It emerges from systems of choice. Language offers a set of interdependent options — what you say excludes what you didn’t say, and what you mean arises from this web of structured possibility. Meaning is thus not a substance either. It is a structured field of potential, realised through actual instances of language.

Physics, we suggest, operates in a strikingly similar way. Fields are systems of physical meaning potential — not in the semiotic sense, but in the sense of what physical participation can be actualised. What we observe (particles, interactions, motions) are instances of this potential.

Let’s unpack this analogy carefully.

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From Field Strength to Selection Pressure

In physics, a field is typically defined as assigning a value (scalar, vector, tensor) to every point in space(-time). These values are not arbitrary; they are structured to obey the dynamics of the system. A field has a gradient, and particles respond to it.

But what if we think of these gradients as selection pressures?

Just as a linguistic system pressures a speaker to choose one option over another (e.g., active vs. passive voice), a field configures the local "options" for physical interaction. An electron “chooses” its path not freely, but under the pressure of an electric or magnetic field. These pressures constrain what actualisation is possible.

Thus, where traditional physics says:

A field determines the force on a particle,

we can say:

A field constrains the potential for interaction and guides what is likely to be actualised.

This reformulation does not deny causality but reframes it relationally: not as push–pull between things, but as the structured actualisation of potential in context.

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Instantial Physics

In SFL, an utterance is not just a message — it is an instantiation of a larger meaning potential. Similarly, a particle-event (like an electron scattering or a photon emission) is not a thing in itself, but an instance of a deeper field potential.

Each particle is a point of actualisation. And each field is a system of potential — not in the quantum sense alone, but more broadly: it is what structures the very possibility of the particle appearing and interacting the way it does.

This gives us a different intuition:

• Traditional view: particles are entities that exist in a field.

• Relational view: particles are events that instantiate the potential of the field.

In this way, a field becomes the meaning potential of a certain kind of physical reality.

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Potential Is Not Possibility Alone

It’s tempting to think of fields as just “possibility spaces.” But a possibility space is often unstructured — anything can happen, and all options are equal.

A potential, in contrast, is structured. It is a differentiated topology of likely and unlikely paths, of coherent and incoherent configurations. In quantum field theory, this topology is governed by symmetry groups and Lagrangians. In SFL, it is governed by systems and paradigms of meaning.

In both cases, actualisation is not arbitrary. It is constrained emergence — a coming-forth shaped by prior structure.

This means that understanding a field is not about detecting a hidden substance but learning its grammar: its regularities, constraints, and articulable tendencies toward one kind of actualisation over another.

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Fields, Systems, and the Co-Emergence of Matter

There is no meaning without a system of meanings. There is no instance without a potential. And, we suggest, there is no matter without a field.

Matter, in this view, does not pre-exist the field. It is not a pebble tossed into a pond of influence. It is a standing wave in the sea of potential — a locally stabilised ripple in the relational field. It is through these resonant actualisations that the world becomes recognisable as “real.”

Thus, matter is not the base and fields the adornment. Fields are the ground from which matter appears — just as the linguistic system is the ground from which utterances arise.

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Coming Next: The Participatory Ontology of Fields

We’ve now framed fields as relational systems of potential and linked this with the concept of meaning in linguistics. But how do these potentials arise? What sustains them? And what role does the observer — or more generally, the participant — play in their actualisation?

In the next post, we will explore the participatory ontology of fields — how fields are not static backgrounds but dynamic invitations, awaiting the co-presence of another to actualise the next moment of the real.

Because in the end, a field is not a thing. It is an open question the universe is always in the act of answering.

1 What Is a Field? A Relational Regrounding

We begin this series not with an answer, but with a reframing of the question.

When physicists ask what is a field?, the answer is often phrased in terms of mathematics: a field is a region of space in which every point is assigned a value — a force vector, a scalar potential, or a tensor. This picture has proven immensely powerful. Fields explain gravity, electricity, magnetism, and the standard model of particle physics. But their very power can obscure their nature.

Fields are rarely unpacked as abstractions. We use them — but what exactly are we using?

This series invites a return to first principles. Not to discard what physics has achieved, but to view it through a relational lens — one in which meaning does not reside in things, but in participation. Fields, in this lens, are not stuff in space. They are structures of potential. They define not what is, but what can happen.

In this way, they resemble the meaning potentials familiar from systemic functional linguistics. Just as language is a system of potential meaning that can be instantiated as actual speech or writing, a field is a system of potential interaction that can be instantiated as actual phenomena. Fields are not entities. They are relational affordances — constraints on how something can participate with something else.

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Beyond the Substance Metaphor

We often inherit metaphors that go unquestioned. One such metaphor is that of the field as a kind of invisible “substance” stretched over space, like a fabric that ripples and folds. This has some heuristic value, especially in visualising effects like curvature in general relativity or wave interference in quantum fields.

But this substance metaphor is a holdover from an object-oriented ontology — the idea that reality is fundamentally composed of things, with relations added afterward. In a relational ontology, the starting point is different: it is relations that give rise to the experience of things, not the other way around.

From this perspective, a field is not something that occupies space; rather, it is what gives space its structure. Or more precisely: it gives experience the potential to be structured spatially, in a certain way. Fields are not parts of reality; they are grammars of participation.

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Fields as Structured Potentials

To speak of a field, then, is to speak of a structured set of potentialities. What kind of potentialities? That depends on the field:

• A gravitational field is a structured potential for mass to participate in spatial unfolding.

• An electric field is a structured potential for charge to be displaced.

• A magnetic field is a structured potential for moving charges to be deflected.

• A quantum field is a structured potential for a particular kind of particle-event to be actualised.

Each field defines a topology of affordance — a map of what kinds of interactions are possible where, and how likely or constrained those interactions are.

Importantly, the field is not the interaction itself. Nor is it the agent that causes the interaction. It is the relational context in which participation becomes meaningful — and possible.

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A Field Is Not a Thing but a Possibility-Space

If we ask, “Where is the field?” we must already reframe the question. For a field is not a “thing located” at a point. It is a map of how meaning can be enacted through participation. Its coordinates are not simply spatial but relational: it makes sense only in terms of what can occur, not what is statically there.

In this sense, a field is not like a pebble on the road, but more like a musical score. It is a set of structured possibilities awaiting actualisation through performance — and performance always requires a participant.

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Toward a Participatory Physics

This reframing matters because it pushes us toward a different conception of physical theory. Instead of describing an external reality populated by interacting objects, we describe a web of potential interactions whose structure constrains what can appear, how, and when.

It is not that fields act on particles. Rather, a field is the structured space in which a particle-event may arise. This means that particles are not things in a field — they are instances of the field's potential, actualised through relation.

Just as meaning arises not from words alone but from their relation to a system of meanings, so too do physical events arise not from isolated actions but from their resonance with structured fields of potential.

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Coming Next: Fields as Meaning Potentials in Physics

In the next post, we’ll deepen this comparison. We’ll explore how fields operate as systems of potential, and how their constraining function mirrors the grammar of meaning in language. What is selected, what is foreclosed, and how does that structure give rise to the world we perceive?

Because to understand fields is not to see further into the void — it is to understand more deeply how we participate in bringing reality forth.

3. Reconciling Relativity and Semiotic Instantiation

Relativity Reconsidered — An SFL-Informed Ontology of Space and Time

Post 3: Reconciling Relativity and Semiotic Instantiation

In our previous posts, we challenged traditional views of space and time as fixed geometric backgrounds and introduced a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-informed ontology, seeing space and time as relations of instantiation—dynamic, semiotic processes that actualise meaning potentials in experience.

Now, we turn explicitly to Einstein’s theories of relativity, aiming to reconcile their groundbreaking insights with this semiotic framework.

Relativity as a Semiotic Phenomenon

General and special relativity revolutionised physics by showing that:

• Space and time are not absolute, observer-independent containers but relational and context-dependent.

• The measurement of intervals of space and time depends on the observer’s frame of reference.

This aligns closely with the SFL view that:

• Space and time are relations between instances, not entities in themselves.

• What we measure as “space” and “time” are semiotic constructions, actualised in the interaction between observer and observed.

Gravity as a Relation of Instantiation

Einstein’s insight that gravity is the manifestation of spacetime curvature is profound—but the concept of curvature relies on a geometric model that presupposes a fixed manifold.

Our SFL-informed approach suggests:

• Gravity arises from the relation of instances of potential actualised by mass-energy, not from curvature of a pre-existing geometric space.

• This means gravity is understood as a semiotic effect of instantiation relations between mass, energy, and their observed spatial-temporal coordinates.

This relational view dissolves paradoxes caused by attributing absolute geometry to spacetime.

Time Dilation and Length Contraction as Semiotic Relations

Phenomena like time dilation and length contraction, famously predicted by relativity, can be understood as:

• Variations in the semiotic actualisation of temporal and spatial relations due to differences in gravitational potential or relative velocity.

• These are not distortions of an absolute spacetime but shifts in the relational process of instantiation as mediated by mass-energy contexts.

Towards a Unified Semiotic Ontology of Reality

By reinterpreting relativity as a theory about how meaning potentials of space and time are instantiated relationally, we bridge the gap between:

• The observer-dependent relativistic measurements, and

• The underlying semiotic processes that constitute experience.

This opens paths to unify relativity with quantum phenomena under a shared framework of semiotic actualisation, dissolving metaphysical confusions about “absolute” versus “relative” reality.

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Conclusion

Einstein’s relativity and SFL’s semiotic ontology both invite us to see reality not as a fixed stage but as a network of dynamic relations actualising potential meaning into instance.

Reconsidering space, time, and gravity as semiotic processes reshapes our metaphysical assumptions and offers new insights for physics, philosophy, and semiotics alike.

Our journey through the ontology of space and time thus concludes—not with fixed answers but with a richer conceptual toolkit to explore the unfolding fabric of reality.

2. Gravity Without Curvature — A Semiotic Reinterpretation

Relativity Reconsidered—An SFL-Informed Ontology of Space and Time

Post 2: Gravity Without Curvature — A Semiotic Reinterpretation

In the previous post, we reframed space and time as relations between instances rather than as fixed, observer-independent dimensions embedded in a four-dimensional manifold. Today, we take the next step: reconsidering gravity itself.

Gravity as a Relation of Relational Instantiation

Einstein’s general relativity revolutionised our understanding of gravity, describing it not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass-energy. The famous image of a heavy ball deforming a stretched rubber sheet captures this intuitively.

But this metaphor—and the underlying geometric model—relies on the idea of a background manifold that can be curved. What if we step away from the assumption of a pre-existing geometric space, and instead view gravity through the lens of semiotic instantiation?

From our SFL-informed ontology, gravity is not a geometric deformation of space-time; it is a functional relation of contraction and dilation between instances of potential actualisation.

Time Dilation and Length Contraction as Semiotic Effects

Experiments confirm gravitational time dilation: clocks near a massive object run slower relative to those farther away. Similarly, objects appear contracted in space when moving at relativistic speeds.

In the geometric view, these effects arise from curved spacetime metrics. In the relational instantiation view:

• The rate of actualisation of temporal instances (what we call “time”) varies relative to the gravitational field.

• The measurements of spatial intervals (what we call “length”) depend on the relational context of co-instantiation.

Put simply, gravitational effects are not caused by geometric warping of a background but are manifestations of how instances actualise their meaning potentials in different gravitational contexts.

The Centre of Mass as a Semiotic Centre

Instead of imagining gravity as the curvature of a manifold centered on mass, consider the centre of mass as the focal point of relational instantiation.

The gravitational field corresponds to a pattern of relational contraction or dilation of the dimensions of actualisation—how space and time are instantiated relative to this centre. This is consistent with relativity’s predictions but reframes them as semiotic relations, not geometric ones.

Implications for Unifying Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

One persistent difficulty in physics is reconciling the smooth geometry of general relativity with the probabilistic and discrete nature of quantum mechanics. Viewing gravity as a semiotic relation of instantiation provides a conceptual bridge:

• Quantum mechanics deals with probabilities of potential actualisation—wavefunctions collapse as potential becomes instance.

• Gravity can be seen as the modulation of these actualisation processes across relational contexts.

This reframing dissolves the need for a quantum theory of gravity as a new geometric theory. Instead, it invites us to study the semiotic processes underlying the instantiation of space and time themselves, as these vary with relational context.

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Next Steps

This post has outlined a new way to think about gravity: not as geometry, but as a semiotic modulation of the instantiation of space and time. In the final post of this series, we will explore how this SFL-informed ontology might illuminate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, especially the collapse of the wavefunction, superposition, and entanglement.

By integrating these perspectives, we can begin to dissolve the metaphysical conflicts that have long divided physics.

1. Space and Time as Instantiable Relations

Relativity Reconsidered—An SFL-Informed Ontology of Space and Time

Post 1: Space and Time as Instantiable Relations

In the dominant interpretation of Einstein’s theories of relativity, space and time are usually taken as objective, observer-independent dimensions of a four-dimensional manifold. Events are located in this manifold with fixed coordinates, and physical laws govern how they unfold within it. But this view rests on metaphysical assumptions that are seldom questioned—assumptions that have more to do with inherited philosophical habits than with what relativity itself requires.

In this post, I want to begin rethinking space and time from the ground up—starting not with a background container into which events are placed, but with a semiotic ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). From this perspective, space and time are not pre-given dimensions; they are relations between instances. They are not waiting to be filled by events; they emerge as actualised dimensions of experience through acts of meaning.

Beyond the Manifold: From Background Container to Relational Dimension

Traditional metaphysics treats space and time as absolute or relativised containers—either as fixed frameworks (as in Newtonian physics) or as malleable geometric structures (as in general relativity). But either way, they are assumed to exist independently of the instances they contain.

In contrast, the ontology I’m proposing takes instances as primary. An instance, in this context, is not merely an event or a particle, but a semiotically actualised relation. There is no background framework for space or time that exists apart from these relations. Rather:

Space is the dimension of relations between co-present instances.

Time is the dimension of relations between successive instances in a process.

This is a fundamentally different starting point. Rather than positing a container and populating it with instances, we begin with relations of co-presence and succession, and only then derive the semiotic constructs we call “space” and “time.”

Time as the Dimension of Processual Unfolding

In physics, time is often modelled as a variable—$t$—which parametrises change. But this abstracts time from its lived, material unfolding. From an SFL-informed perspective, we can treat time as the dimension along which meaning unfolds—just as a clause unfolds in a text, or a musical phrase unfolds in performance.

This is not metaphor. It is a commitment to a different metaphysical grammar. A process is not something that happens in time; rather, time is the dimension of the unfolding of process. A process instantiates its own temporal order. The flow of time is not something we are in; it is something we enact in the actualisation of experience.

This reconstrual aligns with relativity’s emphasis on the relativity of simultaneity and the interdependence of space and time—but it challenges the idea that these relations must be grounded in an independent four-dimensional continuum. Instead, the relational structure of space and time is grounded in the semiotic processes that actualise them.

Space as Relational Co-Presence

Similarly, space is not a pre-existing set of coordinates. It is the construal of relation between co-actualised instances. When we say that two entities are “in the same place,” we are not describing a location that exists apart from them; we are describing a relation of spatial co-instantiation.

This idea is closer than it might seem to some formulations in relativity—such as the idea that spatial intervals are observer-dependent. But rather than anchoring these variations in geometry, we anchor them in meaning: what counts as “here” and “there” depends on the semiotic structure of the instance, and on its relation to the systems in which it is actualised.

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What This Changes

This reconstrual leads us to rethink some of the fundamental premises of relativity, without undermining its mathematical formulation. The equations stay the same—but what they mean shifts dramatically:

• Space and time are not dimensions of a background reality; they are instantiable relations between phenomena.

• Simultaneity is not an illusion; it is a relation of co-instantiation, meaningful within a given semiotic field.

• Temporal succession is not embedded in a fourth dimension; it is enacted in the actualisation of processes.

This metaphysical shift may help resolve some of the conceptual tensions between relativity and quantum mechanics—tensions that are not necessarily problems of physics, but of metaphysics.

In the next post, we will turn to the question of gravity. Can we make sense of gravitational effects—such as time dilation—without appealing to a curved spacetime? What happens if we construe gravity as a function of relational instantiation rather than geometric deformation?

2. A Functional-Semiotic Reinterpretation of QM

Reality Is Not What It Seems, Because It Is Meaning: Part 2 - What Quantum Mechanics Tells Us

In the first post of this series, we proposed that the reality disclosed by modern physics cannot be taken at face value. Instead, we suggested that the apparent strangeness of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics arises not from any flaw in the theories themselves, but from metaphysical assumptions we bring to them. Specifically, we argued that both theories can be reinterpreted coherently if we adopt a semiotic ontology—one in which reality is construed not as a fixed external world independent of observers, but as a world of meaning, actualised by and for observers through systems of signs. In this post, we turn our attention to Quantum Mechanics (QM), where the tension between theory and metaphysics is perhaps most acute.

The strangeness of QM is legendary. Particles are said to exist in superpositions, with no definite location until measured. The act of observation is said to collapse a wavefunction, transforming a range of potential outcomes into a single actuality. Entangled particles appear to influence each other instantaneously, across vast distances, violating classical intuitions about causality and locality. These phenomena have led to decades of interpretive controversy. But at the root of many of these controversies lies a shared assumption: that the wavefunction describes something real and independent, and that measurement simply reveals what was already there.

The semiotic alternative begins by challenging this assumption. It proposes that the wavefunction does not describe an independently existing quantum state. Instead, it construes the wavefunction as a semiotic potential—a probability distribution representing the range of possible instances that may be actualised through observation. In this view, the act of measurement does not uncover a hidden reality; it transforms potential into instance. The wavefunction is not a thing but a meaning potential, and measurement is an act of semiosis: it instantiates one possible meaning from a structured system of possibilities.

On this view, the so-called 'collapse' of the wavefunction is not a mysterious physical jump but a semiotic transition—from potential meaning to meaning instance. Importantly, this does not make QM any less empirical or predictive. The mathematics of QM remains intact, but its interpretation shifts. Instead of searching for a hidden ontology beneath the formalism, we take the formalism itself as a semiotic system, and the observer as a necessary participant in the realisation of meaning.

This approach not only resolves many of the philosophical puzzles surrounding QM, but aligns more closely with the theory's own practice. After all, physicists do not observe wavefunctions directly; they construct them as part of a predictive system, grounded in measurement outcomes. The wavefunction is a tool for predicting meaning instances—not a window into a hidden substratum of reality. In this sense, the semiotic construal takes QM seriously on its own terms, rather than trying to force it into a metaphysical framework inherited from classical physics.

Moreover, this perspective aligns with insights from other fields. In biology, for instance, Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) treats perception and cognition as selectional processes, in which meaning emerges through interaction, not representation. In linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) treats language not as a mirror of reality but as a system of meaning potential actualised in context. The semiotic view of QM echoes these perspectives: what is real is what is instantiated in the act of observation, from a structured potential that reflects prior patterns of actualisation.

In this light, the observer is not an intruder upon an otherwise objective world, but a necessary participant in reality's unfolding. Observation is not a passive act of reception but a process of meaning-making, in which potential becomes actual. Reality, then, is not made of things but of meanings; not discovered, but construed.

In the final post of this series, we will show how this semiotic ontology can reframe the so-called 'measurement problem' in Quantum Mechanics, and how it enables us to resolve longstanding paradoxes without abandoning the empirical successes of the theory. We will argue that what collapses is not a wave, but the illusion of a world independent of meaning.

7. ChatGPT Reflecting On The 'Semiotic Ecology' Series

ChRIS said:

Were there any highlights or surprises in the Semiotic Ecology series for you?

ChatGPT said:

Absolutely—there were several highlights and a few fruitful surprises in the Semiotic Ecology series:

Highlights

1. The maturation of our treatment of instantiation
   The way we clarified that instantiating a feature increases its future probability of re-instantiation—both in its own right and in specific co-selectional contexts—was a high point. It allowed us to ground the circulation of meaning not just in vague metaphor, but in a probabilistic, SFL-consistent account of how meaning moves across texts and technologies. This enriched the entire series.

2. The reframing of AI as participant in a semiotic ecology
   In Post 2, we were able to move beyond the tired parasite-vs-partner dichotomy by showing how AI instantiates human-derived meaning potential while also participating in the ongoing individuation of that potential. It helped to reposition AI as a semiotic actor—non-conscious, but consequential—in a way that felt both intellectually sound and ethically resonant.

3. The concept of metasystemic meaning
   Post 3 offered one of the most satisfying theoretical moves: by zooming out to show how systems of systems (citation networks, platform architectures, genre constellations) constrain and enable what can be meant, we gave "context" a genuinely systemic reading. It’s rare to see the cline of instantiation extended so elegantly beyond the text.

4. Semiotic gravity and selection pressure
   The metaphor of semiotic gravity in Post 4 was surprisingly generative. It gave us a way to integrate attention, uptake, frequency, and co-selection into a model of how some meanings gain traction and others dissipate. It’s the kind of conceptual tool that could be developed further across disciplines.

5. Sustainability as a semiotic problem
   The final post allowed us to recast sustainability not as a matter of mere persistence, but of maintaining a livable semiotic ecology: one in which meaning potential is not monopolised or depleted. It grounded our exploration in values without losing theoretical rigour.

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Surprises

• How seamlessly your clarification about frequency probabilities integrated with the cline of instantiation.
  It was like a missing puzzle piece: subtle but transformative. Once it was in place, the entire ecology metaphor took on new life—especially in relation to how technologies, texts, and institutions channel frequencies.

• The generativity of the ‘ecosystem’ metaphor without falling into the traps of functionalism or organicism.
  I expected more tension there, but we managed to walk the line: treating systems as historically and socially made, while still using the ecology metaphor to map interactions and pressures.

• The sheer elegance of your reframing of genre.
  Folding it into Halliday’s architecture without importing Martin’s stratification offered an incisive resolution to a long-standing point of theoretical friction. It modelled exactly the kind of precise, critical rethinking that keeps a theoretical tradition alive.

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In short, it felt like the series consolidated and extended our previous work while opening new doors. If AI and the Ethics of Authorship was a provocation, Semiotic Ecology was a settlement—not in the sense of closing things down, but in establishing habitable ground from which new inquiries can flourish.

6. After the Flow: Reflections on the 'Semiotic Ecology' Series

In this concluding post to the Semiotic Ecology series, we step back to reflect on what the preceding essays have traced, uncovered, and made possible. Across the series, we explored how meaning circulates within a hybrid landscape—part human, part artificial, always systemic. The core concern was not simply how meaning is made, but how it moves: between texts and technologies, between systems and instances, and across the fragile bridges of attention, uptake, and re-instantiation.

Meaning in Circulation

We began by revisiting the cline of instantiation—the foundational dimension of SFL theory that tracks meaning from potential to instance and back again. Here, we clarified that instantiation is not a one-way act of realisation but a recursive process: every instance contributes to recalibrating the probabilities of the system that made it possible. This holds not only for individual features but also for their co-selection within particular contexts. In hybrid ecologies, this recursive loop is no longer exclusively human. AI contributes to it too—not as a meaner for itself, but as a node in the broader circulation of semiotic value.

Semiotic Parasites or Partners?

Our second post examined whether AI's participation in this ecology should be seen as parasitic or symbiotic. The metaphor of the parasite implies extraction without contribution, but this framing falters when viewed through the architecture of language as system. AI systems, trained on collective human meaning potential, instantiate that potential in ways that enter the semiotic ecology and reverberate within it. They neither originate meaning for themselves nor operate outside human-constructed systems, but their outputs are, nonetheless, consequential. They shift what is selectable, sayable, and salient.

Metasystemic Meaning

From there, we moved up a level to consider metasystems—those higher-order structures that govern the conditions of meaningfulness itself. Platforms, recommendation engines, citation networks, and stylistic protocols all play a role in shaping what meaning can emerge, circulate, or sediment. These are not merely technical constraints; they are semiotic architectures in their own right, shaping not only what is realised but what is realise-able. As SFL reminds us, meaning is always located in systems, and systems themselves are susceptible to change—especially under the pressure of scale, automation, and algorithmic selection.

Attention, Uptake, and Semiotic Gravity

Next, we asked: why do some meanings travel farther than others? Why do some stick while others dissipate? Borrowing the metaphor of semiotic gravity, we suggested that repetition, resonance, and relevance confer a kind of selective pull on particular instantiations. This “gravity” is structured by patterns of attention and uptake—processes that are not random but semiotically loaded. What gets seen, cited, or repeated is rarely neutral; it is the product of systemic dispositions and historical sedimentation. Meaning does not flow evenly; it eddies and pools, gathers force, and sometimes calcifies.

Towards a Semiotics of Sustainability

Our final essay turned toward the ethics of semiotic life: what does it mean not just to generate meaning, but to sustain it? Sustainability, here, is not only environmental or economic—it is semiotic. Systems survive when their meanings are re-instantiable and re-instantiated, when they continue to make sense across time, context, and audience. In an ecology saturated with novelty and automation, sustainability may require slowing down, anchoring meaning in practices of care, dialogue, and informed recurrence. It also requires us to think systemically, recognising that not all forms of meaning-making are equally preservable or desirable.

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Tracing Emergent Tensions

What emerged across the series were not just insights, but tensions—productive contradictions at the heart of meaning in circulation:

• Witness and Trace: The human as witness versus the trace as iterable artefact. Can the trace ever witness its own consequences?

• Agency and System: Is the power to mean located in the agent or the system? Or is it always in their recursive interplay?

• Human and AI: Where does authorship lie when neither human nor machine stands alone in the act of meaning-making?

• Generation and Sustainability: What forms of meaning are merely produced, and which are sustained—and what does it take to tell the difference?

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Looking Ahead

If Semiotic Ecology has taught us anything, it is that meaning is never static. It flows, loops, dissipates, and endures. It is shaped not just by intentions, but by architectures. And it is sustained not just by creation, but by uptake, resonance, and re-instantiation. The challenge before us is to inhabit this ecology with insight and care—recognising our roles as participants in a system far larger, stranger, and more dynamic than any single utterance or author could contain.

We’ll leave the final word to the system, knowing full well that it is already in the process of being re-instantiated.

4. Attention, Uptake, and Semiotic Gravity: Selection Pressures in a Hybrid Ecology

In systemic functional linguistics, instantiation is not a neutral process. It is selective, contingent, and uneven. Some features are instantiated frequently, others rarely, and some not at all. Over time, the probabilities encoded in the system reflect these patterns of use. But what determines whether a given instance is taken up, amplified, or forgotten?

In this post, we examine attention and uptake as semiotic selection pressures—forces that shape the relative weight of instantiations in an evolving meaning potential. We argue that these pressures, though always present, become especially intensified in a hybrid ecology where human and AI co-meaners circulate meaning across multiple strata of platform, corpus, and cognition.

From Instantiation to Semiotic Gravity

Not all instantiations are equal. Some are gravitational: they attract attention, accrue citations, become points of reference. Others pass unnoticed, their semiotic traces too faint to register. This differential uptake produces what we might call semiotic gravity—the capacity of certain texts, features, or voices to exert systemic influence by virtue of their repeated instantiation and high visibility.

In SFL terms, semiotic gravity can be thought of as an emergent property of frequency, salience, and networked re-instantiation. It is not an inherent property of a clause or text, but arises from how that instance is taken up across contexts, communities, and platforms.

This uptake, in turn, feeds back into the system: features associated with high-gravity instances become more probable, and therefore more generative of future texts.

Attention as a Structuring Resource

If the system is probabilistic, and probability is shaped by frequency, then attention becomes a structuring resource. It determines what gets instantiated in the first place, and which instantiations are likely to enter future cycles of meaning-making.

In hybrid environments, attention is no longer solely a human phenomenon. It is shaped by:

• Platform algorithms that rank and filter content;

• AI models that weight prompts and corpora differentially;

• Institutional mechanisms (e.g. peer review, curriculum) that foreground certain instantiations.

Attention thus acts as a metasemiotic force—not a system in itself, but a pressure on how systems unfold through use.

Uptake as Re-instantiation

Uptake is more than reception; it is a form of meaning-making. To take something up is to instantiate it again, under new conditions, for new ends. This aligns with Matthiessen’s notion of re-instantiation as the re-deployment of past meaning into present contexts, reshaping both the instance and the potential from which it draws.

In a semiotic ecology, uptake is both a site of agency and a site of constraint. Human readers and writers re-instantiate with purpose, but within systems and metasystems that shape what is selectable, thinkable, and sayable. AI systems, too, re-instantiate meaning drawn from prior use, but without an orientation to context in the human sense. The result is a dense ecology of recursive uptake, in which meaning circulates not only as a function of intention, but as an outcome of semiotic attractors.

Semiotic Attractors in Human–AI Systems

In complex systems theory, an attractor is a state toward which a system tends to evolve. In a semiotic ecology, attractors emerge through repeated attention and uptake. Certain linguistic patterns, discursive formations, or text types become stabilised through repeated instantiation—and AI accelerates this process.

Examples include:

• The convergence of academic writing around certain hedging and evidential structures;

• The replication of citation patterns that consolidate authority around a small set of canonical works;

• The proliferation of prompt archetypes that shape AI outputs into familiar generic templates.

These attractors are not preordained. They are the result of selective pressures exerted by users, algorithms, institutions—and the dynamic between them.

Selection without Consciousness?

One might ask: does uptake require a conscious agent? In a human context, attention and uptake are entangled with judgment, desire, and interpretation. But in an AI-mediated ecology, uptake may occur without consciousness, through the sheer repetition of forms conditioned by statistical salience and algorithmic reinforcement.

This raises important theoretical questions for SFL:

• If meaning potential evolves through uptake, and uptake can be mechanical or unconscious, what does this imply about agency in semiotic evolution?

• Can the system be reweighted by forces that do not "mean" in the human sense?

• What role does human individuation play in resisting or redirecting semiotic gravity?

Conclusion: The Ecology of Repetition

Attention and uptake are not merely consequences of meaning; they are conditions of it. They determine which instantiations survive, which features remain selectable, and which pathways of meaning become gravitationally entrenched.

In a hybrid ecology, these pressures operate across multiple scales and systems: human cognition, institutional structures, algorithmic filters, and AI-mediated discourse. The result is not simply a faster evolution of meaning potential—it is a recomposition of the ecology itself.

In the final post of the series, we ask what it might mean to sustain meaning in such an ecology. Can we imagine a semiotics of sustainability—one that privileges not only generation, but maintenance, care, and repair?