Wheeler's 'It From Bit' Though Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 300-1):

In an article entitled "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links," the theoretical physicist John Wheeler claimed, at the end of the 1980s, that there was no escape from the conclusion that "The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any pre-established continuum physical law." It would be more accurate, opined Wheeler, to think of the physical Universe as a gigantic information-processing system in which the output was as yet undetermined. As an emblem of this massive paradigm shift, he coined the slogan "It from bit." That is to say, every it — every particle, every field of force, even spacetime itself — is ultimately manifested to us through bits of information. …

Wheeler is an extreme exponent of the "participatory universe" philosophy, in which observers are central to the nature of physical reality, and matter is ultimately relegated to mind.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, modelling the world as a giant machine is reconstruing experience as human technology.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the information-processing system is conscious processing and the information it processes is the meaning it construes of experience. Wheeler's 'it' is the construal of experience as first-order meaning (phenomena), and Wheeler's 'bit' is the reconstrual of first-order meaning as second-order meaning (metaphenomena). It is not that every 'it' is manifested through bits of information, but that every 'it' is construed as bits of information.

In this view, it is not that matter is relegated to the mind, but that matter is a construal of experience as meaning by conscious processing.