“In your mind’s eye, it seems, you can see before you the many could-worlds that follow from one real world.” Isn’t it exactly what many-worlds interpretation does to QM (to keep it deterministic, yada-yada-yada; to be fair, Brandon specifically stated he is not considering the QM sense, but I am not sure the sense he suggested himself is distinct)? There are worlds that are (with not-infinitesimally-low probability-mass) located in the future of the world we are now (and they are multiple), and there are worlds that are not. The former are “realizable”, and they “follow”—and whether they are reachable depends on how good the “forward search process that labels certain options as reachable before judging them and maximizing” is. My intuition says that “could” can mean the former, rather than “whatever my mind generated in the search as options” (and, moreover, that the latter is a heuristics of the mind for the former). (Unless, of course, the real bomb under this definition is in “probability-mass” hiding the same “could-ness”, but if you are going to tell me that QM probability-mass is likewise reducible to labeling by a search process and this is the “correct answer”, I will find this… well, only mildly surprising, because QM never ceases to amaze me, which influences my further evaluations, but at least I don’t see how this obviously follows from the QM sequence.)
Moreover, this quotation from Possibility and Could-ness seems to hint to a similar (yet distinct, because probability is in the mind) problem. > But you would have to be very careful to use a definition like that one consistently. “Could” has another closely related meaning in which it refers to the provision of at least a small amount of probability.
“In your mind’s eye, it seems, you can see before you the many could-worlds that follow from one real world.” Isn’t it exactly what many-worlds interpretation does to QM (to keep it deterministic, yada-yada-yada; to be fair, Brandon specifically stated he is not considering the QM sense, but I am not sure the sense he suggested himself is distinct)? There are worlds that are (with not-infinitesimally-low probability-mass) located in the future of the world we are now (and they are multiple), and there are worlds that are not. The former are “realizable”, and they “follow”—and whether they are reachable depends on how good the “forward search process that labels certain options as reachable before judging them and maximizing” is. My intuition says that “could” can mean the former, rather than “whatever my mind generated in the search as options” (and, moreover, that the latter is a heuristics of the mind for the former). (Unless, of course, the real bomb under this definition is in “probability-mass” hiding the same “could-ness”, but if you are going to tell me that QM probability-mass is likewise reducible to labeling by a search process and this is the “correct answer”, I will find this… well, only mildly surprising, because QM never ceases to amaze me, which influences my further evaluations, but at least I don’t see how this obviously follows from the QM sequence.)
Moreover, this quotation from Possibility and Could-ness seems to hint to a similar (yet distinct, because probability is in the mind) problem.
> But you would have to be very careful to use a definition like that one consistently. “Could” has another closely related meaning in which it refers to the provision of at least a small amount of probability.