In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.”
Mr. Gleick is speaking in terms of concepts of mainstream thinkers in physics and I’m not criticizing him, but I’d suggest that it’s better to regard objects not as objects and also not as probabilistic smudges but rather as nodes of relationships. When certain relationships are complete at both ends, one node to another, the object acts much like an object of the common-sense world. When that object is dependent upon a pending relationship, it has a fuzziness which can be labeled a “probabilistic smudge,” I guess, though the term seems little more than a meaningless placeholder.
It be far more rational, at least in my opinion, to describe such an object as being an incomplete concrete act-of-being. I stole the term ‘act-of-being’ from St. Thomas Aquinas so that I might use it in my worldview which I have described, with some good reasons, as an updating of Thomism to consider modern empirical knowledge. I’m learning how to use ‘act-of-being’, and other terms and concepts which are mostly under development or are still a bit ghostly, for richer and more complex discussions of created being, in its abstract and concrete forms. My willingness to speak of created being as a spectrum from abstract entities to concrete, thing-like entities adds the interesting complication that the smudgy object isn’t yet a well-defined object but the abstract forms of being from which it is shaped are still in existence, though it’s not clear if they can be located in any particular place. At the same time, those abstract forms of being will continue on even in the most humble of concrete things in a way weakly analogous to clay continuing to exist in the hardened brick.
Concrete being is shaped from more abstract being by the sorts of relationships modern physicists have explored with so much success.
And that is a very simple synopsis of some important parts of my worldview.