What I mean by reaching meaningful conclusions about counterfactuals is that you start with a problem statement, a description of a possibly counterfactual situation, and then you see what follows from that. You don’t get to decide that pink elephants follow just because the situation is counterfactual, any pink elephants would need to follow from the particular problem statement that you start with. Existence of other counterfactuals (other possible worlds) with pink elephants is completely irrelevant, because we are not reasoning about them at the moment.
Similarly, if you reason about the physical world that isn’t real, it doesn’t matter that there are other alternative physical worlds that are also not real with different properties, because we are reasoning about this particular not-real world, not those other ones. The problem statement constrains the expectations, not reality of the thing referenced by the problem statement.
What I mean by reaching meaningful conclusions about counterfactuals is that you start with a problem statement, a description of a possibly counterfactual situation, and then you see what follows from that. You don’t get to decide that pink elephants follow just because the situation is counterfactual, any pink elephants would need to follow from the particular problem statement that you start with. Existence of other counterfactuals (other possible worlds) with pink elephants is completely irrelevant, because we are not reasoning about them at the moment.
Similarly, if you reason about the physical world that isn’t real, it doesn’t matter that there are other alternative physical worlds that are also not real with different properties, because we are reasoning about this particular not-real world, not those other ones. The problem statement constrains the expectations, not reality of the thing referenced by the problem statement.