“Counterfactuals are about the state of mind of the observer”—I agree. But my question was why you don’t think that they have anything to do with decisions?
When do you think counterfactuals are important?
When choosing the best counterfactual gives us the best outcome.
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.
“Counterfactuals are about the state of mind of the observer”—I agree. But my question was why you don’t think that they have anything to do with decisions?
When choosing the best counterfactual gives us the best outcome.
Maybe we have different ideas about what counterfactuals are. What is your best reference for this term as people here use it?
An imaginary world representing an alternative of what “could have happened”
Ah, so about a different imaginable past? Not about a different possible future?
A different imaginable timeline. So past, present and 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.