The Place Of Conscious Observers In Scientific Descriptions Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 209):

The solution to the problem of how we know, feel, and are aware is not contained in a philosophical sentence, however profound. It must emerge from an understanding of how biological systems and relationships evolved in the physical world. 

When that evolution resulted in language, the imaginable world became infinite. There is great beauty and much hope in the realisation of this open-endedness of imagination. But we must continually return from that world to the world of matter if we are to see how as conscious observers we are actually placed within our own descriptions. Analysing that placement will be one of the major goals of the science of the future.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the world of matter is the world of the material-relational domain of first-order meaning (phenomena), whereas the world of imagination is the world of second-order meaning (metaphenomena): the projected ideas and locutions of the symbolic processing of the mental-verbal domain.

The place of the conscious observer in scientific descriptions is as the mental-verbal medium through which the meaning of language, construed of experience, is reconstrued as the meaning of the language of science.

Because the mental-verbal domain ('secondary qualities') is not the concern of Galilean science, it is limited to understanding the place of conscious observers in its descriptions only in material-relational terms.