The idea that reality consists mainly of possibilities arose from puzzles in modern physics that point to a fundamentally different way of thinking about reality.
It’s been a century since physics revealed deep flaws in our understanding of everyday reality. If you first measure one property of a particle (for example, its spin) and then another (for example, its velocity), you may get a different result than if you measure these properties in reverse order. The answer depends on the order in which the questions are asked. Furthermore, in quantum mechanics, probabilities are used not because we don’t have information (for example, when calculating the probability that your opponent is a spade), but because this information is not yet available! (These are actually two sides of the same coin; i.e., both order effects and irreducible probabilities occur naturally without a fully defined ground state prior to measurement.)
Interestingly, psychologists have discovered something very similar about the human mind. in a field known as quantum to knowresearchers have found that people’s decisions often depend on the order in which different ideas are kept in mind. Ask someone first about one aspect of a political candidate and then about another, and you may make a different decision if the order is reversed. Classical theories decision making Struggling to explain such order effects, the mathematical framework developed for quantum theory often predicts them surprisingly well. This does not mean that the brain is a quantum computer. But it does show that both physical systems and human reasoning can evolve from a potential state rather than revealing preexisting responses. In other words, potential states are more fundamental than actual ones.
One attempt to understand this is physicist David Deutsch’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this view, every possible outcome occurs, but in a different universe; that is, every quantum event leads to a branching of reality. There is another version that somewhere you ate something else for breakfast, and another Earth where history unfolds in a different way, etc. This is a provocative solution, but I think there is another solution. It’s (like physicists) asking “What do the equations actually describe?” It came not with a request. but (as a psychologist) “Why does the world appear to us the way it does?”
Relevance tenders in a sea of potential
According to this view, instead of innumerable fully realized worlds, i.e., worlds of reality consisting of actually existing objects and actually occurring events, there is only one world whose essential nature is not actuality but potentiality. Real events constantly crystallize from a vast tapestry of potential, like fine fractal ice crystals spreading across a half-frozen body of water.
This idea grew in part from early research with my Ph.D. the controller is enabled context-based realization of potential (Gabora and Aerts, 2005): how objects change over time, by realizing the possible states of their context, situation or environment. If this all seems incredibly abstract, it may be because our minds have evolved to hide from us the unreality of what we perceive as reality. Nervous systems evolved not to reveal the universe, but to help organisms live long enough to reproduce. Each species perceives a fragment of reality that is important to its way of life and considers these perceptions to be reality itself. Bees see ultraviolet patterns in flowers that we cannot see. Bats move by echolocation. Psychologists are increasingly looking at human perception less like a camera and more like a user interface. It presents us with a simplified picture of reality, not as it used to be, but as a tool for successful action.
Our everyday experience can be part of this interface.
Mind lives in reality (but now and then falls into potentiality)
The process of transforming potential into reality occurs not only in perception, but also in thought. When we describe something through language, music, painting, or even mathematics, we turn it into a story. We decide where the story begins, what details are important, how events connect and what they mean. Even the most reliable account of experience is an interpretation. Our minds attach such narratives to what psychologists call a worldview—an integrated internal model of the world and our place in it. Each new experience is evaluated against this ever-changing network of meanings. When we encounter new ideas and possibilities, we subconsciously ask, “Is this true?” but “Does it fit?” As I see it, harmony is a practical criterion for our reality (Vieira and Gabora, 2026).
Thus, our worldview creates streams of conscious experience by consolidating networks of actuality—objects, events, memories, explanations—from a sea of unrealized possibilities. These frozen trajectories of reality successfully guide our actions and guide us into the future, but they are who we are lives truth, we mistake them for truth itself.
Influence on creativity
Seen this way, creativity acquires new importance. Creativity is about turning potentials into reality. Most of us spend our lives following clear paths through reality, but creative people stay longer in the realm of possibilities around them. They tolerate uncertainty, make improbable connections, and delay certainty until forms in their minds have had enough time to develop and mature. Society needs both; It needs people who are firmly connected to reality, because coordinated action depends on a shared understanding of reality. But this requires people who occasionally jump at the chance, because the ideas of tomorrow do not yet exist as a reality. Every scientific theory or work of art, every technological invention or ritual behavior begins as a possibility until it becomes part of the reality we live together (Carbert et al., 2014; Gabora & Saab, 2011; Scotney et al., 2020).
Affect to create meaning
Thinking about reality as a potential can also affect the meaning-making process for understanding and making sense of our lives. We often experience the past as a frozen chain of events that inevitably leads to the present. Every mistake seems to be permanent. Every missed opportunity feels like a door closed forever. Every loss seems absolute. But perhaps this sense of inevitability is part of the user interface our mind has created. The actual path we travel is just one crystallization through a rich landscape of possibilities. By traveling it, we can change the shape of the field of potential, bringing some possibility closer to the adjacent possibility: possibilities that are newly available because of what already exists. Unrealized opportunities are not actually lost; they shape how we interpret the past, imagine the future, and find meaning. Even sadness changes from this point of view. Death remains real and loss remains painful, but life does not have to be understood only as a fixed sequence of completed events. It also consists of potentials awakened in others, unfulfilled potentials, and potentials still unfolding through the lives it has touched.
All of this could be wrong; reality may ultimately be nothing more than a ceaseless progression of true events. But I believe that our survival-oriented consciousness is something to be drawn from an infinite sea of potential. In this view, our worldviews are not mirrors of reality, but living webs of meaning that crystallize coherent lines of truth in that sea of potential. If so, reality itself is not those directions of actuality, but the potentiality from which they are always emerging.
