I completely agree that reasoning about worlds that do not exist reaches meaningful conclusions, though my view classifies that as a physical fact (since we produce a description of that nonexistent world inside our brains, and this description is itself physical).
it becomes apparent that if our physical world wasn’t real in a similar sense, literally nothing about anything would change as a result.
It seems to me like if every possible world is equally not real, then expecting a pink elephant to appear next to me after I submit this post seems just as justified as any other expectation, because there are possible worlds where it happens, and ones where it doesn’t. But I have high confidence that no pink elephant will appear, and this is not because I care more about worlds where pink elephants don’t appear, but because nothing like that has ever happened before, so my priors that it will happen are low.
For this reason I don’t think I agree that nothing would change if the physical world wasn’t real in a similar sense as hypothetical ones.
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.
I completely agree that reasoning about worlds that do not exist reaches meaningful conclusions, though my view classifies that as a physical fact (since we produce a description of that nonexistent world inside our brains, and this description is itself physical).
It seems to me like if every possible world is equally not real, then expecting a pink elephant to appear next to me after I submit this post seems just as justified as any other expectation, because there are possible worlds where it happens, and ones where it doesn’t. But I have high confidence that no pink elephant will appear, and this is not because I care more about worlds where pink elephants don’t appear, but because nothing like that has ever happened before, so my priors that it will happen are low.
For this reason I don’t think I agree that nothing would change if the physical world wasn’t real in a similar sense as hypothetical ones.
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.