Potentiality and Plasticity

A subtler candidate remains. If nothing is fixed from its own side, appearances seem endlessly malleable. The same dress is seen as white and gold or as blue and black. The same lines are seen as a duck or a rabbit. The same electron appears as a particle or a wave depending on how it is asked. Surely, then, there is a store of potentialities from which these appearances are drawn: Aristotle's potency, Heisenberg's potentia, the abstract space of possibilities that quantum theory describes. Appearances would be the actualisations, and the potentialities what is really there.

This is the move that Substrateless World, in its treatment of quantum measurement, calls a substrate for emptiness. Seeing that phenomena have no fixed nature, the substantialist mind gives their openness a home behind them, and so turns emptiness into a new substance, one made of possibilities instead of stuff.

But a potential is identified only through its actualisation and its partner. Salt is soluble only in relation to water. A seed is a seed only in relation to the sprout. "Could" is a designation made within a framework of conditions, not a thing waiting backstage. When Nāgārjuna says that for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible, the verb means "fits" or "works". It does not describe a reservoir.

Nor is the plasticity infinite. Appearances are open because they depend, and constrained for the same reason. A rope can appear as a snake in dim light. A shadow cannot be walked across as a bridge. The dress divided its viewers into two colourings, not into every colour at once. A plasticity independent of conditions would itself be a kind of own-nature, a power able to make anything from its own side. That is the idealist extreme, not the Middle Way. Appearances are exactly as plastic as their conditions allow, and no more.

The Dzogchen word ma 'gags pa, unobstructed, fits better than "potential". Nothing blocks the display, and there is no store behind it from which the display comes.