If I understand you correctly, the reason that this notion of counterfactable connects with what we normally call a counterfactual is that when an event screens of its own history, it’s easy to consider other “values” of the “variable” underlying that event without coming into any logical contradictions with other events (“values of other variables”) that we’re holding fixed.
For example if I try to consider what would have happened if there had been a snow storm in Vermont last night, while holding fixed the particular weather patterns observed in Vermont and surrounding areas on the preceding day, then I’m in kind of a tricky spot, because on the one hand I’m considering the weather patterns from the previous day as fixed (which did not in fact give rise to a snow storm in Vermont last night), and yet I’m also trying to “consider” a snow storm in Vermont. The closer I look into this the more confused I’m going to get, and in the end I’ll find that this notion of “consider a snow storm took place in Vermont last night” is a bit ill-defined.
What I would like to say is: let’s consider a snow storm in Vermont last night; in order to do that let’s forget everything that would mess with that consideration.
My question for you is: in the world we live in, the full causal history of any real event contains almost the whole history of Earth from the time of the event backwards, because the Earth is so small relative to the speed of light, and everything that could have interacted with the event is part of the history of that event. So in practice, won’t all counterfactable events need to be a more-or-less a full specification of the whole state of the world at a certain point in time?
Yeah, remember the above is all for updateless agents, which are already computationally intractable. For updateful agents, we will want to talk about conditional counterfactability. For example, if you and I are in a prisoners dilemma, we could would conditional on all the stuff that happened prior to us being put in separate cells, and given this condition, the histories are much smaller.
Also, we could do all of our reasoning up to a high level world model that makes histories more reasonably sized.
Also, if we could think of counterfactability as a spectrum. Some events are especially hard to reason about, because there are lots of different ways we could have done it, and we can selectively add details to make it more and more counterfactable, meaning it approximately screens off its history from that which you care about.
If I understand you correctly, the reason that this notion of counterfactable connects with what we normally call a counterfactual is that when an event screens of its own history, it’s easy to consider other “values” of the “variable” underlying that event without coming into any logical contradictions with other events (“values of other variables”) that we’re holding fixed.
For example if I try to consider what would have happened if there had been a snow storm in Vermont last night, while holding fixed the particular weather patterns observed in Vermont and surrounding areas on the preceding day, then I’m in kind of a tricky spot, because on the one hand I’m considering the weather patterns from the previous day as fixed (which did not in fact give rise to a snow storm in Vermont last night), and yet I’m also trying to “consider” a snow storm in Vermont. The closer I look into this the more confused I’m going to get, and in the end I’ll find that this notion of “consider a snow storm took place in Vermont last night” is a bit ill-defined.
What I would like to say is: let’s consider a snow storm in Vermont last night; in order to do that let’s forget everything that would mess with that consideration.
My question for you is: in the world we live in, the full causal history of any real event contains almost the whole history of Earth from the time of the event backwards, because the Earth is so small relative to the speed of light, and everything that could have interacted with the event is part of the history of that event. So in practice, won’t all counterfactable events need to be a more-or-less a full specification of the whole state of the world at a certain point in time?
Yeah, remember the above is all for updateless agents, which are already computationally intractable. For updateful agents, we will want to talk about conditional counterfactability. For example, if you and I are in a prisoners dilemma, we could would conditional on all the stuff that happened prior to us being put in separate cells, and given this condition, the histories are much smaller.
Also, we could do all of our reasoning up to a high level world model that makes histories more reasonably sized.
Also, if we could think of counterfactability as a spectrum. Some events are especially hard to reason about, because there are lots of different ways we could have done it, and we can selectively add details to make it more and more counterfactable, meaning it approximately screens off its history from that which you care about.