Ah. I don’t quite understand the “different past” thing, at least not when the past is already known. One can say that imagining a different past can be useful for making better decisions in the future, but then you are imagining a different future in a similar (but not identical in terms of a mictrostate) setup, not a different past.
No, it cannot. What you are doing in a self-consistent model is something else. As jessicata and I discussed elsewhere on this site, What we observe is a macrostate, and there are many microstates corresponding to the same macrostate. The “different past” means a state of the world in a different microstate than in the past, while in the same macrostate as in the past. So there is no such thing as a counterfactual. the “would have been” means a different microstate. In that sense it is no different from the state observed in present or in the future.
Ah. I don’t quite understand the “different past” thing, at least not when the past is already known. One can say that imagining a different past can be useful for making better decisions in the future, but then you are imagining a different future in a similar (but not identical in terms of a mictrostate) setup, not a different past.
The past can’t be different, but the “past” in a model can be.
No, it cannot. What you are doing in a self-consistent model is something else. As jessicata and I discussed elsewhere on this site, What we observe is a macrostate, and there are many microstates corresponding to the same macrostate. The “different past” means a state of the world in a different microstate than in the past, while in the same macrostate as in the past. So there is no such thing as a counterfactual. the “would have been” means a different microstate. In that sense it is no different from the state observed in present or in the future.