Reality Is Potentiality |
Reality may be, not actuality (concrete objects and events), but potentiality (possibilities).
Minds weave coherent worldviews by crystallizing potentiality into narratives: tapestries of actuality.
Creative minds delve into this sea of potentiality to actualize new ideas.
Meaning-making occurs by forging a more coherent worldview (a more stable tapestry of actuality).
The idea that reality is fundamentally made of possibilities grew out of puzzles in modern physics that seem to point toward a radically different way of thinking about reality.
It’s now been a century since physics revealed deep flaws in our everyday conception of reality. If you measure one property of a particle first (such as its spin), and then another (say, its velocity), you can get a different outcome than if you measured these properties in the reverse order. The answer depends on the order in which you ask the questions. Moreover, in quantum mechanics, probabilities are used not because we lack information (such as when you calculate the probability that your opponent has the ace of spades), but because that information doesn’t yet exist! (These are actually two sides of the same coin; that is, if there is no fully specified underlying state before measurement, then both order effects and irreducible probabilities follow naturally.)
Interestingly, psychologists discovered something remarkably similar about the human mind. In a field known as quantum cognition, researchers found that people's decisions often depend on the order in which different considerations are brought to mind. Ask someone first about one aspect of a political candidate and then another, and you may obtain a different judgment than if the order is reversed. Classical theories of decision-making struggle to explain such order effects, whereas the mathematical framework developed for quantum theory often predicts them surprisingly well. This doesn’t mean the brain is a quantum computer. But it suggests that both physical systems and human judgments may evolve from states of potential rather than reveal pre-existing answers. In other words, potential states are more fundamental than actual ones.
One attempt to make sense of this is physicist David Deutsch's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this view, each possible outcome occurs, but in a different universe; i.e., every quantum event causes reality to branch. Somewhere, there’s another version of you who ate something else for breakfast, and another Earth where history........