From Physics to Meaning: How Our Relational Ontology Emerged

The relational ontology outlined previously did not emerge in abstraction. It was born from the meeting point of three powerful traditions: quantum mechanics, relativity, and systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Each offered a glimpse into a world not made of fixed objects, but of interdependent processes—where potential and relation take precedence over substance and certainty.

Quantum mechanics taught us that a system exists in a superposition of possibilities until an observation takes place. The act of observation does not reveal what is, but actualises what can be. This dynamic between potential and instance mirrors the cline of instantiation in SFL: a meaning potential is not passively awaiting discovery—it is actively instantiated through selection in context. 'Spin' is not a fixed property to be uncovered, but a meaning construed through interaction—an instance drawn from a probabilistic field of potential.

Relativity, meanwhile, replaced absolute space and time with relations among events. There is no universal frame of reference, only processes unfolding in interdependence. Here, too, we find an echo in our ontology: time is not a background container, but the dimension of unfolding; space, not a static grid, but a relation between processes. Reality is not a collection of things in space-time—it is the pattern of processes as space-time.

SFL, finally, offered a meta-semiotic framework for thinking about these issues. Meaning, it showed, is stratified and instantiated. The clause complex—not the noun—is primary: reality unfolds as interconnected processes, not as labels for pre-given entities. SFL also taught us to distinguish between the collective potential of a system, and the individuated subpotentials actualised through actual use—just as quantum systems, social fields, or human subjectivities unfold.

What results is a radical reframing. Rather than seeing physics as the study of a mind-independent world, we treat it as a meaning system—one that construes reality under strict discursive constraints. Reality itself is meaning: not a brute given, but a structure construed by consciousness from experience, using semiotic systems. Physics does not describe what is “really there”; it instantiates meanings, drawn from the potential of our most abstract and disciplined systems.

This is why the relational ontology must be built from the inside out—from meaning as construed, not from matter as presumed. And it is why any system—whether linguistic, scientific, or artificial—must be understood in terms of how it instantiates, organises, and potentially individuates its field of meaning.