In some respects, potential merely indicates a lack of knowledge. For with all knowledge, one might know exactly what will or won't happen, so the concept of potential becomes irrelevant.

An engineer wants his bridge to stand up to any and all reasonable challenges. He doesn't care which particular ones it actually will face.

Obviously the word can be used in various ways. — Mongrel

Is there any particular way you view the word considering its ambiguity? My understanding of it shifts - as you say, when you think of it in terms of physics, it has a completely different meaning to, say, the potential a person has where I see there being an opening, an opportunity where the individual has the pre-existing capacity that has yet to be utilised.

The physics definition is related to personal potential though.

Potential=kinetic × resistance

So a person born with silver spoon might rise to great heights with minimal talent.

I'm confused about potential = kinetic × resistance, what do you mean? Do you mean the sum of the changes that measure the amount of lost kinetic energy that has been recovered during this interaction?

I can see the analogy of potential viz. a person whereby two different paths are influenced by external forces though they have the same initial and final points, displacement from that final point remains dependent on the coordinate of these forces, which brings to mind "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." The product of our current state is thus influenced by our physical environment more than our capacity.

if you hold a golf ball in the air there is potential energy associated with it. Unmanifest energy is a philosophical oddity, but...

Whether the ball subsequently falls through air or mollases, the potential is the same. The medium through which the event take a place influences what we see.

The potential can be increased. Raise the ball higher, for instance.

But then as I hold the ball, I tell you I'm never going to drop it. What is the potential?

But then as I hold the ball, I tell you I'm never going to drop it. What is the potential? — Mongrel

I understand the elementary explanation of potential energy, I meant how you relate that with subjective potential of an individual. I would say that when you hold the ball it is potential energy since there is no velocity and therefore contains no kinetic energy either, even if you move your hand around because of the conservation (that is under the assumption of how you hold the golf ball). If you said a basketball on your finger, however, that would be a different story.

Potential is about a possible future event. It gets tricky when talking about "potential people" and the morality of potential people. Can we talk meaningfully about a potential future person that does not exist? If so-and-so procreates, he would have a child, but he does not now. The child is only a potential child.

I meant that what an acorn becomes depends a lot on the environment in which it exists. Same with a human?

Same with a philosophy forum?

If it's true that I'm never going to drop the ball, what is the resistance?

Is it a future event or does it already exist? I think this is interesting given that we have the intrinsic quality to consciously experience something like procreation and given we are aware of the potential, we are able create it. To say a future event could assume the potential, so a child that is born is assumed to develop the cognitive capacity of adequate intellectual functioning, but what if it has autism? There is no potential, despite what we imagine.

You're using potential as synonymous with possible. There are other meanings.

In some respects, potential merely indicates a lack of knowledge. For with all knowledge, one might know exactly what will or won't happen, so the concept of potential becomes irrelevant. — Kenshin

On the contrary, knowledge itself is a form of potential, because it allows us to do various things. Knowledge allows one to decide what will or won't happen. So contrary to what you claim, the concept of potential is very relevant for understanding the existence of knowledge.

There is no potential, despite what we imagine — TimeLine

How is this the case? A possibility exists for a future person. There is a potential for a person with unknown qualities or with vague qualities based on known biological and environmental determinants. Nevertheless, the potential for a new person exists.

Physically a potential (for change) is a symmetry, a state of equilibrium balance, not yet broken.

Probably there should be a distinction between potentiality and possibility. Potentiality is a sort of possibility, but one that is "almost immanent", i.e. not just imaginary or purely abstract but literally just waiting for something to make it actual. Potentiality is possibility that is right on the edge of becoming actuality because the conditions are ripe.

Sounds about right.

Potentiality is physical, as opposed to merely logical, possibility, then?

Language use is confused here. But potential usually is taken to refer to a general power that is then localised in its expression. So it is predicated of a thing and expresses some finality. The ball wants to fall.

Possibility is then dichotomous to that in speaking instead of what might happen spontaneously or contingently. It is something that global context or constraint is indifferent to, and so has no especial desire either to forbid or desire.

So both potential and possible talk about the particularity of some change - some breaking of a symmetry or state of suspension. And if we are talking about an already complexly developed world with rich structure, then goal-directed potential and possibility as undirected chance are clearly quite different kinds things.

But if we wind back existence to its simplest state, then the situation is going to become ... vague. An atom waiting to decay seems to be expressing both an extremely definite desire to thermalise (as captured in its wavefunction) and also the total spontaneity of possibility in that its actual decay is an instant of utter material accident.

So the metaphysical distinction that is easy to make in a complexly developed world becomes an indistinct or vague one in a state of maximum Metaphysical simplicity. Potentiality and possibility become one "thing" yet to be separated.

Potentiality is physical, as opposed to merely logical, possibility, then? — John

I would say potentiality is "actual possibility" whereas abstract, imaginary possibility is "hypothetical possibility". But yes, potentiality is "physical" if we are saying that the conditions actually exist for this possibility to become actuality.

I want to say there is some connection to causal dispositions of things that is important here. Something could be potential if there is a disposition that is waiting to "react" as soon as the conditions present themselves.

But I don't think we can really make any sharp distinction between potentiality and non-potential possibility. It seems like anything with potential is logically possible, and from there we just see which ones have a greater likelihood of happening.

I think that's why potentiality is the most valuable thing. It's better than possibility because it actually has a chance of happening, and it's better than actuality because it hasn't started to decay or disappoint. It's pure anticipation.

f it's true that I'm never going to drop the ball, what is the resistance? — Mongrel

You are posing this as an instance of the unmovable object and the irresistible force. And that is a paradoxical framing as it claims the existence of a potential that can't be actualised.

In fact a ball blocked by your hand is some equilibrium balance between different species of force or potential energy. The attraction of a gravitational potential is in balance with the repulsion of the electrostatic forces that bind the ball and make your hand a barrier.

So the resistance - the threshold that must be topped to break this particular symmetry state - is whatever endurance you can muster given a ball of some variable weight. Are we talking ping pong balls or cannonballs? Are we talking about you as Pee Wee Herman or Superman?

In the real world, a ball in the hand is going to have to be a more materially specified state - more symmetries will be already broken. And if we then want to employ the generality of some thought experiment - as we would metaphysically - then it is important that we recognise that the notion of a potential does include the idea of a threshold not yet breached. And then that symmetry breaking can take two general forms - the accidental or the deliberate. Either material spontaneity or the necessity of finality may be the reason for a potential becoming actualised.

With your "ball that I won't let drop", you are playing with the paradoxical seeming contrast between these two limit notions of contingent vs necessary. Your decision to hold the ball is turning its gravitational potential into an "impossibility" - and so apparently making it a species of possibilty in that its desire to fall has been thwarted.

I want to say there is some connection to causal dispositions of things that is important here. Something could be potential if there is a disposition that is waiting to "react" as soon as the conditions present themselves. — darthbarracuda

Such a "disposition" would be conceived as a physical actuality involving some actual set of energetic interactions or relationships, wouldn't it? It seems that a mere logical possibility, on the other hand,
need not involve any physical actuality at all.

But I don't think we can really make any sharp distinction between potentiality and non-potential possibility. It seems like anything with potential is logically possible, and from there we just see which ones have a greater likelihood of happening. — darthbarracuda

I think this just says that all actual possibilities must also be logical possibilities, not that all logical possibilities must be actual possibilities. So, it seems there is certainly a "sharp distinction" to be made.

I think that's why potentiality is the most valuable thing. It's better than possibility because it actually has a chance of happening, and it's better than actuality because it hasn't started to decay or disappoint. It's pure anticipation. — darthbarracuda

Perhaps you are speaking in terms of emotional or psychological value here? Otherwise, I can't see how any potential could have any actual value unless it is actualized.

By logical possibility, you mean counterfactuality. Things are definite in that they must either be the case, or not. So we can only count possibilities in terms of what we imagine as determinate outcomes. Logical possibility is constrained by its rules - the laws of thought - of which the law of non-contradiction is central here.

Material potential is a larger state in that it is ultimately vague or indeterminate. Logically, non-contradiction does not apply to this pure definition of "the posible".

But on the other hand, logical possibility - as semiotic variety, all that we could speak about - is larger than physical potential as physical potential only "speaks to" the actually materially realisable. And the logically possible lets us speak about eveything that is also in fact the impossible. We are doing that already - raising the ficticious, the alternative, the contradictory - just in the act of speaking.

So each kind of possibility exceeds the other. Hence the air of dualism that hangs forever over any serious Metaphysical debate. Physical existence is founded on a vague potentiality that exceeds any hope of us being able to list its contents in counterfactual manner. But then our ability to dream up counterfactual worlds is just as limitless seeming.

To resolve this dualism is tricky. But physics has discovered that information is in fact holographically bounded. You can't physically speculate about alternative worlds in a fashion that exceeds the Planck limits on energy density. A brain or computer eventually will cram so much effort into a region of spacetime that it will collapse under its own gravitational force to become a black hole.

So a unifying principle has emerged where potential - either epistemic or ontic, physical or symbolic - can be measured in a single coin, the Planckscale information bit, or canonical material degree of freedom.

@Apokrisis - interested in your take on the article from which this excerpt is taken. It uses a notion of 'potential' to address some of the well-known conundrums arising from quantum theory.

[A] founder of quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg, stated that a quantum object is "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality." Heisenberg called this "potentia," a concept originally introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. It turns out that if we apply Heisenberg's insight to an intriguing interpretation of quantum theory called the transactional interpretation (TI), we gain a unified understanding of all three paradoxical aspects of quantum theory.

TI was originally proposed by John G. Cramer, professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Its key feature is that the process of absorption of a quantum state is just as important as the process of emission of a quantum state. This symmetry is nicely consistent with relativistic quantum theory, in which quantum states are both created and destroyed. But it comes with a counterintuitive feature: The absorption (or destruction) process involves quantum states with negative energy. For this reason, TI has generally been neglected by the mainstream physics community.

However, it turns out that if you include this "response of the absorber," you get a solution to the so-called "measurement problem" — the problem of Schrödinger's Cat. A clear physical account can be given for why the cat does not end up in a "fuzzy" superposition of alive and dead. We even get a natural explanation for the rule used to calculate the probabilities of measurement outcomes (the so-called "Born Rule" after its inventor, Max Born).

In TI, the "collapse of the quantum state" is called a transaction, because it involves an "offer" from the emitter and a "confirmation" from the absorber, much like the negotiation in a financial transaction. When these occur, we get a "measurement," and that allows us to define what a measurement is — and explains why we never see things like cats in quantum superpositions. But, in the new development of TI, the offers and confirmations are only possibilities — they are outside the realm of ordinary space-time. In fact, it is the transactional processes that creates space-time events: "Collapse" is the crystallizing of the possibilities of the quantum realm into the concrete actualities of the space-time realm. So, collapse is not something that happens anywhere in space-time. It is the creation of space-time itself.

Quantum Physics And The Need For A New Paradigm, Ruth E. Kastner.

Perhaps you are speaking in terms of emotional or psychological value here? Otherwise, I can't see how any potential could have any actual value unless it is actualized. — John

Not actualized, but recognized, by a psychological agent capable of encountering value.

You can't physically speculate about alternative worlds in a fashion that exceeds the Planck limits on energy density. A brain or computer eventually will cram so much effort into a region of spacetime that it will collapse under its own gravitational force to become a black hole. — apokrisis

That's an interesting point, but for much more "ordinary" reasons, I think it's easy to see that there are energy constraints on the sheer amount of speculating or imagining that any individual is actually capable of doing, and also what forms such imaginings can take:forms composed of amalgamations of sensorially acquired, conceptually mediated "material" taken from the "real world" of common experience, however unlikely those amalgamations might be.

For example, fruits, nuts and seeds have nutritional value; but that value must be actualized by being consumed; it need not be recognized in any psychological sense.

Yep, we are certainly limited by our humanness. But it is now a metaphysically general argument that existence is limited by the resources it has to "compute itself". So your commonsense point can be cashed out as an ultimate ontological restriction on existence.

Of course, the actual physics still leaves plenty of questions unanswered as yet. Can the Planckscale itself vary? What is the source of the dark energy that in fact ensures that the cosmological event horizons can achieve a maximum entropy state?

But physics now can calculate real things by understanding computation - logical possibility - to be constrained by hard material limits. You can imagine a superbrain. But we also now know what it's ultimate physically realisable limits are.

You get 10 points for attempting an answer. Your answer was not correct, though.

I think retrocausality of some kind has to be the case. But TI does the usual physics thing of treating the transactions as a simple reversible symmetry. So the going forward in time is mirrored by a going backwards in time. It is talking of a material/efficient cause that simply swaps its direction in time.

That kind of makes sense as it feels holistic - like seeing an emission/absorption even as a single "handshaking" agreement across time. The event is now a thermal relation like a length of string with two ends.

But it isn't going to be holistic enough - which is why TI has probably languished. I think you need an interpretation which makes use of an actual asymmetry between efficient and final cause. So now what can act from the distant future to constrain the flight of a photon is the finality of a context. The experimenter, in setting up his quantum eraser experiment, is creating the finality which can then work backwards in time to have been constraining the photons flowing from that distant star the past billion years in the statistical wavefunction way so familiar from twin slit empiricism.

So short answer: we have to accept retrocausality in some form, but really that just means accepting quantum contextuality or holism in the broadest sense. The bigger shift in interpretation is giving up on a world made purely of efficient causes (moving either forward or backward in time). Our idea of the world has to embrace the holism of downward acting contextuality or finality.