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CCC comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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Interesting question! I'd say that you could refer to the possibilities as possibilities, e.g. in a debate over whether a particular past would in fact have led to the present, but to speak of the 'actual past' might make no sense because you couldn't get there from there... no, actually, I take that back, you might be able to get there via simplicity. I.e. if there's only one past that would have evolved from a simply-tiled start state for the automaton.
In the Game of Life, a single live cell with no neighbours will become a dead cell in the next step. Therefore, any possible present state that has at least one past state has an infinite number of one-step-back states (which differ from the one state merely in having one or more neighbourless cells at random locations, far enough from anything else to have no effect).
Some of these one-step-back states may end up having evolved from simpler starting tilesets than the one with no vanishing cells.