Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

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Steve3007
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Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Steve3007 »

The word "potential" is used in a wide range of contexts, from abilities in sports to energy and fields in physics. Are there any contexts in which you regard it as coherent to consider a potential to be a real existent? Do you consider all potentials as such? Or none of them? Or some but not all of them?
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by marigold_23 »

Steve3007 wrote: May 13th, 2021, 12:10 pm The word "potential" is used in a wide range of contexts, from abilities in sports to energy and fields in physics. Are there any contexts in which you regard it as coherent to consider a potential to be a real existent? Do you consider all potentials as such? Or none of them? Or some but not all of them?
In my view,
The concept of any potential is only ever a symbol of some current "real" object in relation to our experiences... in other words, that we expect any potential event is the same as expecting a change or a transformation from current stimuli which we recognize by association to similar experiences stored as memory.
The potential for an apple to rot is a description and reference to the real, present, fresh apple... it is not a reference to the future of the apple, which of course we have not yet experienced... it is a prediction, and for all we know our memory could fail us, even the memory of fundamental things like change and the continuation of time... it is a good prediction, but it is not certain... a reference, even if it lacks any relevant memory or data to produce an informed reaction, is, in itself, "certain". If you reference a thing, you interacted, reacted, to something which wasn't you... if you didn't interact and react, then it is not a reference at all.

In my opinion, the only real things "to us" are the things which we interact with... the reality of any potential (including the idea, or symbol, of any future) is traceable to the reality of stimuli in the past and present responsible for generating expectation and specific associations.

There is another kind of potential which is the inherent opposite conception of any experience... the experience of some specific presence of a thing (felt by experience) insists on the potential for the absence of that thing (or the absence of that experience)... if our references to experiences are ever legitimate, than we must also, in those references, refer to the absence of things prior to our experience of them and (even outside chronology) their "potential" absence as a quality spontaneous to the quality of presence.

It could be absurd that we must ever refer to the absence of things at the same time as we refer to the presence, but I would maintain that if this is absurd, then all references must be absurd to the same extent... which is even more absurd, as it would suggest that our statements are not references but random, uncaused expressions....it could be the case, but we couldn't really believe this, at it is antithetical to the most basic usage of memory and data which are used to produce conclusions in the first place.

So, potentials as necessary, basic opposites (reduceable to the potential non existence of existent things) must always be believed "real" as much as we believe the existence of that thing is "real".

Potentials which are more complex such as the potential for a thing to go in one of a multitude of directions is only real as a memory of the thing... the potential is real outside of you, the observer, only as a stimuli in the past, not as a stimuli from the future which you are "pretending" to reference.

(I think)
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

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Steve3007 wrote: May 13th, 2021, 12:10 pm The word "potential" is used in a wide range of contexts, from abilities in sports to energy and fields in physics. Are there any contexts in which you regard it as coherent to consider a potential to be a real existent? Do you consider all potentials as such? Or none of them? Or some but not all of them?
It is certainly coherent in the context of ontology to regard potential(itie)s (* as a kind of properties which are part of the furniture of the world. Whether potential(itie)s really are part of the furniture of the world, and—if yes—whether they are properties sui generis or reducible to some other kind of properties are other questions.

(* or powers, dispositionalities/dispositions, abilities, capabilities, capacities, faculties)
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

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Consul wrote: May 13th, 2021, 7:06 pmIt is certainly coherent in the context of ontology to regard potential(itie)s (* as a kind of properties which are part of the furniture of the world.
What I think is ontologically incoherent is to regard them as nonactual, merely possible entities (mere possibilia).
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Belindi »

When 'potential' is popularly used to mean prediction then 'potential' melds into slightly probable.

In our experience the future does not exist. In the eternal now the future does exist.
When physicists talk about potential energy as opposed to kinetic energy their presumption is eternal law of nature. In our world of relative experience permanent states e.g. potential energy does not exist.
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Fanman »

Consul,
What I think is ontologically incoherent is to regard them as nonactual, merely possible entities (mere possibilia).
That’s the rub. Potential is an entity. Whichever way we frame things – it exists. Its realisation is only possible in the future, but it exists in the now. In objects, potential energy is something that we can calculate and in people, it is something we can perceive.
Theists believe, agnostics ponder and atheists analyse. A little bit of each should get us the right answer.
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Steve3007 wrote: May 13th, 2021, 12:10 pm The word "potential" is used in a wide range of contexts, from abilities in sports to energy and fields in physics. Are there any contexts in which you regard it as coherent to consider a potential to be a real existent? Do you consider all potentials as such? Or none of them? Or some but not all of them?

I understand a "potential" as an imagined future; a possibility. So a potential is an idea or concept. I think you are considering here whether an idea has - or can have - 'existence'? Does an idea exist?

Analytic philosophers can sometimes be a little too literal about existence, whereby only an identifiable component of our space-time universe can have existence. From their perspective, this is a reasonable assertion. But I feel it is a bit limited, and this detracts from its usefulness. Pragmatically, ideas do have existence, and this is illustrated by the way they affect the real-world behaviour of most/all people.

So my view is that potentials, like all ideas and concepts, do exist. But is it worth debating this to 'prove' to naysayers that it is so? I think not. It isn't worth the trouble, and the 'existence' of ideas is a matter of perspective, and not something that can be formally and scientifically/philosophically 'proven'. Nevertheless, we can discuss this issue, and I think the discussion itself is interesting and worth our while. I shall continue reading the posts placed here with interest....
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Terrapin Station »

Steve3007 wrote: May 13th, 2021, 12:10 pm The word "potential" is used in a wide range of contexts, from abilities in sports to energy and fields in physics. Are there any contexts in which you regard it as coherent to consider a potential to be a real existent? Do you consider all potentials as such? Or none of them? Or some but not all of them?
I certainly don't consider potentials to be some sort of unique existent, but that view isn't at all uncommon. One place where it frustratingly creeps up in a lot of contemporary philosophy is in possible worlds talk, where there are a number of people (including professional philosophers) who take possible worlds to be literally existent things rather than just a manner of speaking about possibilities. Similarly in physics, this creeps up in multiverse talk/the multiverse interpretation of qm. That's a pretty direct physics equivalent to philosophy's possible worlds.

I never can figure out just what sorts of unique ontological existents folks are figuring potentials/possibilities/possible worlds to be, and it's one of those things where I'm never sure that they know, either, because no one will allow themselves to be pinned down to attempt to explain it in any detail (at least not without getting so continental/pomo-sounding that it just starts to seem like gibberish, or on the physics side just a lot of mathematical manipulations that they're reifying).

On my view, potential/possibles talk is just a way of referring to the fact that the nature of the world is such that something is not precluded from happening (or wasn't precluded from having happened at the time, in the case of counterfactual possible worlds). So potentials/possibles do not refer to existents in any manner. Just what could exist/what could obtain, given particular causal events or particular random occurrences.
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Nick_A »

The ONE or the Source is outside the limitations of time and space. It is ineffable yet contains within it all potentials in the form of ideas. At the same time potentials as necessary for our universe, manifest as integrated devolved fragments of the whole.

Nature for example is an idea that manifests in the world and the power of this manifestation or the power of the ONE is called "dunamis" When we experience nature we experience dunamis or the power of the ONE

The ONE is the potential for dunamis yet dunamis is the manifested potential for the ONE. I AM as potentials exist together within ONE.
Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil....Gravity and Grace
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Consul »

Fanman wrote: May 14th, 2021, 4:08 am
Consul wrote:What I think is ontologically incoherent is to regard them as nonactual, merely possible entities (mere possibilia).
That’s the rub. Potential is an entity. Whichever way we frame things – it exists. Its realisation is only possible in the future, but it exists in the now.
(What Martin says about dispositions is true of potential(itie)s, powers, and abilities as well:)

QUOTE>
"A particular disposition either exists or it does not. One can say of any unmanifesting disposition that it straight-out exists, even if it is not, at the time, manifesting any manifestation. It is the unmanifested manifestation, not the disposition itself, that is the would-be-if or would-have-been-if, if anything is."
(p. 49)

"A disposition is actual even if its manifestations are not actual. An unmanifesting disposition is not ‘potential being’ or ‘unactualized possibilia,’ although that might be a way of characterizing a disposition’s unmanifested manifestations. These manifestations are what a disposition could do under some, but not all, conditions. They are not what the disposition is or in what it consists. A disposition can come into existence and cease to exist quite apart from whether its manifestations exist during the disposition’s existence."
(p. 140)

(Martin, C. B. The Mind in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.)

"It is somewhat misleading to speak (as we just did) of potentiality and actuality as representing separate realms of being, as though nothing could be both a potentiality and an actuality. In fact, all potentialities are themselves actual, as potentialities. The fragile glass is actually fragile, but to be actually fragile is to be potentially broken. Everything is actually something, and some things also have the potentiality for being something different from what they actually are. A fragile window is potentially but not actually broken. There is also such a thing as being potentially fragile: for example, a form of plastic might be durable at room temperature but fragile at extremely low temperatures. But to be potentially fragile is to have some actual disposition that is two steps removed from being actually broken.

Potentiality is always defined in relation to actuality. All potentialities are potentialities to be actually something or other. It wouldn’t make sense to talk of a potentiality that couldn’t be actualized, but there might be such a thing as an actuality that couldn’t become merely potential. (Aristotle thought that God was such a necessary being.) Actuality is at least conceptually fundamental; that is, there are no other concepts that we use to build the concept of actuality. The concept of actuality is like the concept of blueness, not like the concept of blue-or-red-ness.

There is a dichotomy between two kinds of properties: those properties that have to do only with how a thing is actually, and those properties that also have to do with the ways a thing could potentially be. The first class of properties are called categorical, and the second class dispositional. Being square, for example, seems a plausible case of a categorical property, since to describe a surface as square is to describe how it is actually, without saying anything about what it might do or become. Fragility or flammability, in contrast, are clearly dispositional, carrying implications about what its bearer might do or become."

(Koons, Robert C., and Timothy H. Pickavance. Metaphysics: The Fundamentals. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. pp. 45-6)
<QUOTE

For more on the distinction between categorical properties and dispositional ones, see:

Dispositions: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dispositions/
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Consul »

Nick_A wrote: May 14th, 2021, 9:38 amNature for example is an idea that manifests in the world and the power of this manifestation or the power of the ONE is called "dunamis" When we experience nature we experience dunamis or the power of the ONE.
The ONE is the potential for dunamis yet dunamis is the manifested potential for the ONE. I AM as potentials exist together within ONE.
"Dynamis" is Aristotle's term for potentiality—as opposed to "energeia" = actuality (the manifestation of dynamis: potentiality at work).

Interestingly, in physics "energy" is defined as "a measure of a system's ability to do work" (Oxford Dictionary of Physics), whereas energy in Aristotle's sense of the term is not the ability to do work but the work done (as a manifestation of the ability to do work).

By the way, a potential in the physical sense is "a scalar quantity associated with a field" (Oxford Dictionary of Physics). Examples are the electric potential and the gravitational potential.
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Consul »

Pattern-chaser wrote: May 14th, 2021, 7:26 amI understand a "potential" as an imagined future; a possibility. So a potential is an idea or concept. I think you are considering here whether an idea has - or can have - 'existence'? Does an idea exist?
There is a difference between nonrepresenting entities such as properties and potentials (as a kind of properties) and representing entities such as predicates and concepts (ideas). As Husserl would say, the former are categories of objects (in the broadest sense of "object") and the latter are categories of meaning. For example, someone's potentiality or ability to play the piano is not an idea in his mind. There's a difference between properties and our ideas of them (our mental or linguistic representations of them).
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Consul »

Terrapin Station wrote: May 14th, 2021, 8:15 amOn my view, potential/possibles talk is just a way of referring to the fact that the nature of the world is such that something is not precluded from happening (or wasn't precluded from having happened at the time, in the case of counterfactual possible worlds). So potentials/possibles do not refer to existents in any manner. Just what could exist/what could obtain, given particular causal events or particular random occurrences.
The first question is whether potentialities (potentials, potencies, powers, dispositional properties, abilities, capabilities, capacities, faculties) are mere possibilities or not. If they are not, the question of the existence of potentialities is different from the question of the existence of mere possibilities, or merely possible (possible-but-nonactual) entities.

"Possibilist realism takes non-actual possible objects to be (real, genuine) objects; it takes their metaphysical status to be on a par with that of actual objects. When possibilist realists assert, “Non-actual possible objects exist”, their word ‘exist’ has the same linguistic meaning as when actualists assert, “Actual objects exist”. Possibilist realists believe that some domains of discourse with respect to which ‘exist’ may be understood include more than actual objects, whereas actualists deny it. Thus according to possibilist realism, to call an object non-actually possibly existent is merely to deny its inclusion in a particular realm—call it ‘actuality’—and affirm its inclusion in some other realm. That other realm is no less a realm of existence than actuality is a realm of existence. All realms of existence are metaphysically on a par with one another. Every token use of the existence predicate is to be understood with respect to some realm of existence, either explicitly or implicitly."

Possible Objects: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-objects/
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

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"The possibilist's thesis, however, is that existence, or actuality, encompasses only a subset of the things that, in the broadest sense, are. Rather, in addition to things like us that actually exist, there are merely possible things — possible Aliens, for example — that could have existed, but, as it happens, do not. So there are such things, but they just happen to exhibit a rather less robust but nonetheless fully-fledged type of being than we do. For the possibilist, then, ‘It is possible that there are Aliens’ is true simply in virtue of the fact that there are possible-but-nonactual Aliens, i.e., things that could have existed (but do not) and that would have been Aliens if they had.
Actualists reject this answer; they deny that there are any nonactual individuals. Actualism is the philosophical position that everything there is — everything that can in any sense be said to be — exists, or is actual. Put another way, actualism denies that there is any kind of being beyond actual existence; to be is to exist, and to exist is to be actual. Actualism therefore stands in stark contrast to possibilism, which, as we've seen, takes the things there are to include possible but non-actual objects."


Actualism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/actualism/

(I'm an actualist.)
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Re: Is it ever coherent to claim that potentials are real existents?

Post by Terrapin Station »

Consul wrote: May 14th, 2021, 12:15 pm The first question is whether potentialities (potentials, potencies, powers, dispositional properties, abilities, capabilities, capacities, faculties) are mere possibilities or not.
There's often a connotation of there being a more significant likelihood of potentials occurring, at least if certain other conditions are met. Possibilities can be extremely unlikely.

Aside from that I'd say that there's not really a difference.
. . Thus according to possibilist realism, to call an object non-actually possibly existent is merely to deny its inclusion in a particular realm—call it ‘actuality’—and affirm its inclusion in some other realm.
Whatever the heck "realms" would refer to there, exactly, heh.
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