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faul_sname comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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Say we have a blank grid. It would be reasonable to say "if this blank grid had a glider, the glider would move up and left" even if there is no actual glider on the grid. You can still make a mental model of what would happen in a changed grid, even if that grid isn't instantiated. I chose the example of a glider to show that you don't actually have to run a step-by-step simulation of the grid to predict behavior and thus emphasize that a counterfactual is a mental model, not an actual universe. Counterfactuals require a universe and a model that is isomorphic to that universe in some way, but the isomorphism doesn't have to be perfect.
I like this example, and it counts as a counterfactual in our universe, where there is no actual glider drawn on an actual blank grid, but I am not sure it would count as a counterfactual in a GoL universe, unless you define such a universe to contain only a single blank canvas and nothing else.
So what you're saying is that if we did define such a universe to contain only a single blank canvas and nothing else, our internal model of a grid with a glider would be a good example of a counterfactual?
(thus demonstrating that counterfactuals can, themselves, contain counterfactuals).
Nice one.
I am trying to nail the definition of a counterfactual in a GoL universe. Clearly, if you define this universe as a blank canvas, every game is a counterfactual. However, if the GoL universe is a collection of all possible games (hello, Tegmark!!), then there are no counterfactuals of the type you describe in it. However, what army1987 suggested would probably still count as a counterfactual: given a realization of a game and a certain position in it, find whether another realization, with an extra glider, converges to the same position. The counterfactualness there comes from privileging one game from the lot, not from mapping it to our universe.