Why Physics Gets Stuck on Potential

Modern physics has spent a century circling around a paradox of its own making — a confusion that arises whenever potential is either denied or mistaken for actuality. Quantum theory, in particular, hovers uneasily between these poles. Its equations describe a probabilistic wavefunction — a structure of potential — yet its interpretations continually oscillate between treating this potential as unreal (mere ignorance) or as hyper-real (the many-worlds ensemble).

Both moves betray the same ontological assumption: that what is real must be actual in the sense that observation is actual. Reality, on this view, is exhausted by the phenomenal. Anything not yet actualised is demoted to epistemic status — something merely unknown — or promoted to a speculative substance existing “out there” before measurement.

But both options miss the point.

The Missing Order: The Metaphenomenal

Relational ontology restores the missing dimension of reality: the metaphenomenal. This is not a mystical realm but a systemic one — the theory of the instance, the structured potential of construal. It is neither ontic nor epistemic, but relationally prior to both.

• It is not ontic, because it is not a domain of things.

• It is not epistemic, because it is not a domain of knowledge.
  It is the horizon of potential construal — the relational field from which actuality can be cut.

To ignore this metaphenomenal order is to collapse the distinction between theory and event, potential and actual, system and instance. And that is precisely what physics does when it tries to make potential into a substance, or to explain away its indeterminacy as ignorance.

Actualisation as a Cut, Not a Process

What physics calls “measurement,” “collapse,” or “emergence” are not temporal events but perspectival shifts — relational cuts within the field of construal.

Potential does not become actual; the actual is the construal of potential.

Actualisation is not a process in time but a change of standpoint — a cut from the metaphenomenal theory (structured potential) to the phenomenal event (construed actuality).

The so-called “collapse” of the wavefunction, then, is simply the construal of metaphenomenal probability as phenomenal occurrence. Nothing collapses; something is construed.

Probability and the Metaphenomenal

This also clarifies the status of probability itself. Probability does not describe the world — it quantifies epistemic uncertainty about potential meaning. The potential itself is not probabilistic but systemic: a structured possibility space whose internal logic precedes any measurement.

Thus, probabilities are epistemic, but potential is metaphenomenal.

Confusing the two — treating probability as ontic — leads to the persistent metaphysical incoherence that has haunted quantum theory since its inception.

Dissolving the Confusion

By situating potential as metaphenomenal:

• We preserve the structure of reality without reifying probability.

• We preserve the integrity of observation without appealing to a privileged observer.

• We dissolve the measurement problem by reinterpreting “collapse” as construal rather than event.

Physics, in short, has been asking reality to perform a trick it never promised: to make potential behave like a thing. The quantum world resists not because it is strange, but because it has been misconstrued — epistemologically where it is metaphenomenal, and ontically where it is systemic.

Once that distinction is restored, the paradox disappears.

The wavefunction is not an object waiting to collapse. It is a relational theory waiting to be cut — a metaphenomenal potential actualised as phenomenal reality.

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Coda: Reality as the Construal of Its Own Potential

Reality does not unfold from mystery into knowledge, nor from potential into fact. It folds upon itself as construal — the act through which potential comes to know itself as actual. The world does not wait to be observed; it waits to be cut — to draw itself into coherence, to become event within its own horizon of meaning.