Sorry but I didn't feel like to read the whole thread ... was just curious and fell on this :
What has never lived does not exist. What does not exist cannot die.
You are confusing a "potentiality" with an actuality.
How can you say something like that ? ... Do you know what potential means exactly ? potentiality can't be opposed to actuality (it just can't or that would means that from actuality we know what's potential ... and we can't have any global idea about that for good .. do we ?).
Let's start with pure numbers.
If you have a pair of dice, for example, you can determine probability based on the actual number of sides of the dice. We are only dealing with probability here and not "potentiality" yet. But, I'm setting the stage in such a way we can model what is to come conceptually.
One die (plural: dice) has six sides. There is a side for one spot, two spots, etc. up to six spots.
When you roll that die you will get one of those sides face up. The probability that any particular number will turn up is one out of six or 1/6.
The number of times you repeat this experiment (we'll just call it an experiment since we are gathering data) starts a series of "throws".
Here is where intuition goes awry. In the short run, (a few throws) as compared with the long run (infinite throws) various random patterns will appear which may contain a long string of a particular number. These clusters of events cause people to believe in "luck" (either bad or good).
At no time does the die itself ever "keep track" of what number has turned up in the past. It itself is deaf, dumb and blind. Therefore, the odds of a particular number turning up are always the same. There is no such thing as a "lucky number" in probability. The reality of the short term (as opposed to infinite tosses) is that patterns emerge.
Beliefs about luck abound based on personal experience with the "short term." People develop a kind of sampling sense of how often things occur based on their experiences. These beliefs are skewed by the short term. Random is random and there is no such thing per se as luck.
Luck is what happens AFTER THE FACT looking back on an outcome that was expected.
Now, what does all that have to do with POTENTIAL versus ACTUAL?
There are people who keep track of the numbers which occur on winning lottery tickets. If a number keeps popping up it is called "hot" or "lucky" and numbers that have NOT YET appeared are called "over due" or "likely" to occur. Choosing these numbers is said to increase your chances of winning.
If this were true, however, everybody would win all the time. It isn't true mathematically because the POTENTIAL is never the ACTUAL.
Why?
A POTENTIAL floats beyond real world context.
An ACTUAL is rooted in reality.
A POTENTIAL can be force-fitted into any generality or imagined scenario to build an argument and make it appear logical.
An ACTUAL is what really happens.
Example:
The end of Six thousand years of Human Existence was parlayed by the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses as POTENTIALLY the advent of ARMAGEDDON! All the neat arguments were built around this potential event.
ACTUALLY, it didn't happen.
Why?
A POTENTIAL is not an ACTUAL.
A POTENTIAL is only a useful tool in planning and plotting a future event when it is based on real world probability matched by real world events.
Is that clear? Or, do I need to give more examples?
