Our sense of "could-ness", as in "I could have not rescued the child from the burning orphanage", comes from our own decision making algorithms labeling some end states as "reachable". If we wanted to achieve the world-state of the child being burned, there is a series of actions that would lead to that state.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Causality and Moral Responsibility, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Today's post, Possibility and Could-ness was originally published on 14 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Causality and Moral Responsibility, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.