> Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing... Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one’s unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past. > > James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games Choice is nothing if not an exercise in **prediction**. Every decision we make is an attempt to cast ourselves forward into the unknown, to sketch out a trajectory in the fog of possibility. And yet, the very essence of the future is uncertainty - not merely because we do not know what will happen, but because **our actions continuously shape what can happen**. This renders time an unsettlingly fluid thing, never fixed, never complete, always shifting in response to the movements of the present. The simple, comfortable notion that cause leads to effect, that the past determines the future, begins to fray upon closer inspection. For when we deliberate, when we envision what is to come, we are not merely reacting to the past; we are, in some obscure but profound way, **being pulled forward by a future that does not yet exist**. This is a deeply unsettling thought. It suggests that we are not simply moving through time as through a landscape, navigating from one fixed point to another, but rather that we exist in a dynamic interplay between what is and what is not yet. Our minds do not passively await the unfolding of events; they **reach toward possibility**, orienting themselves in relation to outcomes that remain unrealised. The philosopher and cognitive scientist **Terrence Deacon** refers to this as the paradox of **absential** features—qualities of existence that are defined by absence rather than presence. Goals, intentions, and ideas all belong to this strange category. They are not simply _things_ in the world, but rather _relationships to what is missing_, structures oriented toward futures that may never materialise. When we act with intention, we are not merely following a linear sequence of cause and effect. We are responding to something that does not yet exist, a possibility that exerts influence despite its **ontological nonexistence**. While this sounds fuzzy to modern ears, this is not a novel concept. The ontological status of **potentia**, or potentiality, has been a subject of philosophical intrigue from antiquity to modern physics. **Aristotle** first formulated **dynamis** as **that which is not-yet but can be**, distinguishing it from **energeia**, the **realized actuality**. For him, the cosmos was a theatre of transformation, where matter, imbued with latent possibilities, sought its formal perfection—an acorn aching to be an oak, a sculptor seeing a statue within the marble. Meanwhile, on the banks of the Ganges, the **Samkhya** school of Hindu philosophy had already charted a similar metaphysical landscape, though with a Vedic twist. It captured the metaphysical states of **being** (Sat), **non-being** (Asat), and **not-yet-actualized** (Avyakta) as fundamental building blocks of reality. Fast forward a couple of millennia, and quantum mechanics stumbled upon potentia’s ghost lurking at the heart of physics. **Heisenberg**, drawing directly from Aristotle, declared that quantum states exist as potentia, mathematical shadows of what could be, waiting for a measurement to actualise them. Enter **Schrödinger**, who, perhaps unwittingly, channeled both Aristotle and Samkhya with his wave function, encoding every possible reality until collapse forced a single fate. The irony was not lost on him: the cat in his famous thought experiment existed in a limbo of dynamis, neither fully dead nor alive. The architect shaping a blueprint is already engaging with a structure that has not yet been built. The scientist pursuing an experiment is acting on the basis of a discovery that has not yet been made. The artist painting a canvas is reaching toward an image that exists only in potential, guiding their brush not from the past, but from the **pull of an unrealized form**. In each case, the present moment is not merely unfolding forward—it is being shaped by the absence of something that is not yet here. This inversion of time - where the possible future influences the present - explains why human behaviour so often confounds simple causal models. Institutions and predictive systems struggle to anticipate human action because people do not simply react to their environment; they respond to **imagined futures**, futures that flicker in and out of existence with every shift in thought, every reconsidered goal, every new piece of information. A person on the brink of a life-altering decision does not simply calculate probabilities based on past experience. They feel the weight of futures they might inhabit, futures that press upon them despite their ephemerality. The possible selves they could become exert a gravitational pull on the self that exists now. This is why history cannot be understood merely as a chain of past events pushing inevitably toward a predetermined outcome. Revolutions do not happen because the past makes them inevitable; they happen because people begin to see an alternative future as suddenly, urgently possible. The same is true for individual transformation—one does not change because the past dictates it, but because **a different future begins to loom with enough presence that it forces the present to reconfigure itself in response**. The force of history, of invention, of evolution itself, is not simply driven by what has been. It is pulled by what _could be_. This realisation—that possibility itself is a force, that **absence is not the same as nonexistence** - challenges our most basic assumptions about causality. It suggests that we are not simply passengers on a linear journey through time but **participants in an ongoing negotiation between presence and absence, between what is and what could be**. Our decisions, then, are never purely about the past. They are encounters with an uncertain future, a dialogue with the void of what has not yet come to pass, where the greatest source of uncertainty is not that we do not know what will happen - but that we do not yet know what _we will choose to bring into being_. [[Conclusion|Next section]]