Since "Real" for most folks means "material" or "physical", i prefer to speak of Potentials & Constructive Absences as "Ideal" or "meta-physical". That's because we don't know of their existence via our 5 senses. Instead, we infer their statistically possible existence via the sixth sense of Reason : the ability to fill gaps in knowledge with logical rules of prediction from known premises to probable conclusions.
Those projections into the future are not empirically real, but only theoretically & statistically probable. So they exist as immaterial mental models, alongside Unicorns & Utopias. That's why materialists reject Idealism, as illusory. Our models are indeed figments of imagination. So we can't distinguish fantasies from facts, except by philosophical & statistical reasoning to determine how likely they are.
So "The All", (or G*D, or Cosmic Potential, or BEING) are merely theoretical inferences from our experience with counter-intuitive (or mysterious) features of Reality, and gaps in our understanding of Physics. Quantum Fields & Mathematical Geometry are not real things, they are mental models of how the world might work if we could see Ideality with our third eye (imagination). Unfortunately, some of us take our theoretical (ideal) models as actual, based on wishful Faith instead of testing them with skeptical Reason.
All possible forms that the physical world can take was defined by the initial conditions of the BigBang. So, you could say that the reality we now experience was "sculpted" by The ALL. But, the fact that humans can imagine things-that-are-not-but-might-be is evidence that the program of evolution is doing a heuristic (trial & error) search of the field of possibilities established in the beginning. A Deterministic algorithm is perfect & complete, so would leave no gaps in its calculation. But a Heuristic procedure (like natural Evolution) only looks for "good enough" fitness, hence it omits a lot of not-good-enough candidates. So, some possibilities were left open, to be filled by human Will.
In their arguments about such Real vs Ideal notions as FreeWiil, most people assume that our world is the result of either a divine miracle (absolute perfection) or a natural gapless algorithm (deterministic). Both are top-down processes, with everything pre-destined. But our experience does not confirm that presumption. The world is far from perfect. Hence, whoever or whatever "sculpted" this work-of-art, was either imperfect, or intentionally allowed for novelty to emerge. Thus a heuristic program of evolution would be a bottom-up kind of self-creation.
That's why I view the world as a self-organizing program with only the basic Operating System (natural laws & initial conditions) established in the Singularity Seed. Therefore, a heuristic program for evolution could allow Possibility Space for creative human imagination (FreeWill) to alter the course of evolution in tiny incremental steps that gradually transform Nature into Culture.
People Are Really Bad At Probability, And This Study Shows How Easy It Is To Trick Us :
https://www.fastcompany.com/3061263/peo ... o-trick-us
What is the basic difference between determinative optimization, heuristic optimization :
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_ ... techniques
What is the difference between a heuristic and an algorithm? :
"What the algorithm does is precisely defined"
"A heuristic is still a kind of an algorithm, but one that will not explore all possible states of the problem, or will begin by exploring the most likely ones."
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/233 ... -algorithm
Ideality :
In Plato’s theory of Forms, he argues that non-physical forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate or perfect reality. Those Forms are not physical things, but merely definitions or recipes of possible things. What we call Reality consists of a few actualized potentials drawn from a realm of infinite possibilities.
1. Materialists deny the existence of such immaterial ideals, but recent developments in Quantum theory have forced them to accept the concept of “virtual” particles in a mathematical “field”, that are not real, but only potential, until their unreal state is collapsed into reality by a measurement or observation. To measure is to extract meaning into a mind. [Measure, from L. Mensura, to know; from mens-, mind]
2. Some modern idealists find that scenario to be intriguingly similar to Plato’s notion that ideal Forms can be realized, i.e. meaning extracted, by knowing minds. For the purposes of this blog, “Ideality” refers to an infinite pool of potential (equivalent to a quantum field), of which physical Reality is a small part. A formal name for that fertile field is G*D (or whatever label you prefer for the whole of which we are sentient parts).
BothAnd Blog Glossary
THIRD EYE IS NOT MYSTICAL, BUT IMAGINATIVE
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZEL68kt1Q-8/maxresdefault.jpg
PS__It's probably the heuristic (trial & error) procedure of evolution that makes it seem "absurd" to those who look at the trees (parts) and fail to see the forest (whole system). Reductionism is a good method for empirical Science, but not for hypothetical Philosophy. Therefore, when it's applied to subjective ideas instead of objective things, that logical method may result in reductio ad absurdum.
Absurd = illogical
Heuristic = fuzzy logic