Wheeler's 'Participatory Universe' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Gribbin (1990: 212):

Wheeler goes on to consider the whole universe as a participatory, self-excited circuit.  Starting from the Big Bang, the universe expands and cools; after thousands of millions of years it produces beings capable of observing the universe, and "acts of observer–participancy … in turn give tangible 'reality' to the universe not only now but back to the beginning."  By observing the photons of the cosmic background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang, we may be creating the Big Bang and the universe.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, Wheeler's "acts of observer participancy" are acts of construing experience as meaning.  The history of the universe, from the Big Bang onwards, is meaning that is created when experience is construed.