Isn’t “possible worlds” the identical question? How can you determine whether an imagined world is “possible”, without reference to the same intuitions about non-physical causality?
Hmm, to me counterfactual conditionals are of the form “what would have happened if <something that happened didn’t>?” not “what might happen if this or that predictive model is more accurate?” I am all for the latter approach, the former strikes me as confused and confusing. But maybe I am the one who is confused, hence my question.
“Physics” says it’s a meaningless question. If you subscribe to determinism, it’s all predetermined some time around the Big Bang. If you subscribe to a stochastic world, then probabilities were predetermined at the time of the Big Bang. So the best you can say is that there are multiple possible outcomes with different probabilities (whether in the map or in the territory) and one of them happened.
Isn’t “possible worlds” the identical question? How can you determine whether an imagined world is “possible”, without reference to the same intuitions about non-physical causality?
Hmm, to me counterfactual conditionals are of the form “what would have happened if <something that happened didn’t>?” not “what might happen if this or that predictive model is more accurate?” I am all for the latter approach, the former strikes me as confused and confusing. But maybe I am the one who is confused, hence my question.
You can use physics to answer that kind of question, as the OP says. What further problem is there?
“Physics” says it’s a meaningless question. If you subscribe to determinism, it’s all predetermined some time around the Big Bang. If you subscribe to a stochastic world, then probabilities were predetermined at the time of the Big Bang. So the best you can say is that there are multiple possible outcomes with different probabilities (whether in the map or in the territory) and one of them happened.
Physics isn’t semantics. The question is meaningful because it can be answered.