I was recently watching an episode of the hillarious Netflix series 'Cunk on Earth'. The series, on its surface, starts with exploring the history of the world, in the style of the great Sir David Attenborough in BBC Earth, but frequently lapses into nonsensical questions and remarks. In one passage of the episode I was watching, Cunk makes fun of the famous philosphical dictum 'I think, therefore I am' (reputedly coined by the 17th century French phisopher Rene Descartes) and goes into some convoluted ruminations on that, and also asks hillarious questions of an expert.
But, quite apart from all that Descartes meant to convey by the phrase, this seems to have a surprising parallel to the world of quantum physics. As physicists like Carlo Rovelli (in his 'Helgoland', a history of how quantum theory was postulated in 1920s and then developed by a series of renowned scientists, many of them Nobel laureates) like to explain, anything in this world exists only in as much as it interacts with other things. It's like answering the age old question 'If a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, did it actually fall' with a 'No', since it didn't 'interact' with anyone. In that sense, it seems all things actually exist only as... ummm... possibilities or potential, not as real things, and 'pop into being' only when they interact with other things. In the style of the elusive particles the observed behaviour of which apparently gave rise to the whole discipline of quantum physics.
But coming back to philosophy, it may also be said that even human beings exist only as possibilities or potential, in the rhetorical sense at least. Positive Psychology guru Martin Seligman says that more than half of us are 'living in the future', that we're constantly thinking about future scenarios moment to moment, sometimes based on things done in the past and often predicted by what we intend to do. But all such future plans are potential only, good or bad, and fructify as concrete things only when our plans or intentions are translated into actual action...
