1 The Metaphysical Drift of Modern Physics: What Physicists Get Wrong About Reality
Introduction: Physics Has a Philosophy Problem
Physicists like to say they don’t do philosophy. Many even claim to have moved beyond metaphysics altogether. But this declaration of independence is itself deeply metaphysical. It masks an allegiance not to the absence of metaphysics, but to a particular metaphysical tradition — one that treats reality as a ready-made, mind-independent world of things, into which science merely peers. This tradition, often referred to as "naïve realism" or "substance metaphysics," is rarely scrutinised by physicists themselves. Yet it profoundly shapes how they interpret even the most successful and well-confirmed physical theories, often leading to confusion, contradiction, and pseudo-paradoxes.
This is not a problem with the theories. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are not broken. The problem lies in the meanings physicists project onto these theories — meanings that are constrained by the metaphysical assumptions they refuse to examine. What is needed is not a new physics, but a new way of thinking about physics: one that treats science as a meaning-making activity, grounded not in substances but in systems, instances, and the construal of experience.
Metaphysical Inheritance and Unconscious Commitments
The historical development of physics has always been entangled with metaphysics. Newton's absolute space and time, for instance, presupposed a metaphysical backdrop in which motion and measurement could be universally grounded. Einstein, in developing relativity, dismantled this backdrop. Yet the tendency to reify space and time as "curved substances" or to treat spacetime as an all-containing container shows how easily old metaphors slip back in.
Similarly, quantum mechanics emerged from an explicit break with classical determinism. Yet physicists routinely ask where particles "really are" when they're not being observed, or what a wavefunction "really is" — as if the theory must describe an objective reality independent of observation. This insistence on mind-independent being turns interpretive questions into metaphysical traps. It also ignores a central lesson of quantum theory: that the act of observation is not a passive revelation of what is already there, but a constitutive event.
What physicists often call a "measurement problem" is, at root, a metaphysical problem: it arises only if we assume that reality must be fully determinate and observer-independent. But why should we assume that? What if reality is not a brute fact to be discovered but a structured potential that becomes actual only in the act of observation? What if physics is not a mirror of nature, but a semiotic system for making meaning from experience?
The Cost of Confusion
When physicists remain unaware of their metaphysical commitments, they end up mistaking philosophical problems for physical ones. This has led to interpretive cul-de-sacs: the many-worlds interpretation, for example, multiplies actualities in an effort to preserve a classical notion of determinacy. Other interpretations, like pilot-wave theory, sneak in hidden variables to maintain a metaphysical sense of realism. None of these "solutions" arise from physics itself; all are attempts to save a particular vision of reality.
The price of this confusion is high. It encourages bad philosophy, obscures the elegance of the theories themselves, and misleads the public into thinking that physics traffics in paradox and mystery. Worse, it blinds physicists to the real interpretive resources available within their own discipline. By refusing to think semiotically — to treat scientific theories as systems of meaning that organise potential and actual instances of experience — they cut themselves off from more productive ways of understanding the world.
A New Ontology for Physics
To move forward, we need to foreground the semiotic nature of scientific modelling. Physics doesn’t describe a pre-given world; it constructs meaning from interaction with the material order. Quantum states are not hidden realities but structured potentials. Space and time are not substances but dimensions of the unfolding of processes, defined by relational measurements.
In place of substance metaphysics, we need an ontology of instantiation. What we call "reality" is not a collection of things, but a dynamic system in which potentials are actualised in and through observation. This ontology does not undermine science; it makes its meaning explicit. It invites us to treat physics not as the pursuit of ultimate being, but as a disciplined way of making sense of the world.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we will explore how this meaning-based ontology can illuminate the core concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity, showing how these theories work when we free them from metaphysical confusion. Far from being mysterious, they offer a coherent picture of a world in which meaning is not imposed from outside, but unfolds from within.
Stay tuned.
2 Reality Is Not What It Seems, Because It Is Meaning: 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 actualisation 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.
3 The Observer as Co-Creator: Reconstructing Quantum Mechanics in a Semiotic Ontology
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 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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