The Thoughts Of James Jeans Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Kœstler (1979: 542-3):

Jeans went even further [than Eddington]:

The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature — a space which is finite; a space which is empty, so that one point [which appears to us unoccupied by a material body] differs from another solely in the properties of the space itself; four-dimensional, seven and more dimensional spaces; a space which for ever expands; a sequence of events which follows the laws of probability instead of the laws of causation — or, alternatively, a sequence of events which can only be fully and consistently described by going outside space and time, all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realisation in any sense which would properly be described as material.

And again:

Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

Blogger Comment:

Jeans' view is consistent with the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory that meaning is immanent, not transcendent; that meaning is within the domain of the semiotic systems, and not outside them; that meaning is a construal of experience.  Within the semiotic domain, it is also consistent with the notion of meaning as the content of consciousness, that is, as the ideas projected by mental processes.

From the perspective of SFL Theory, the concepts of theoretical physics are construals, by consciousness, of the non-semiotic domain as second-order meanings (meanings of meanings) of the material–relational domain of language.