CronoDAS comments on Right for the Wrong Reasons - Less Wrong

14 Post author: katydee 24 January 2013 12:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (66)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: simplicio 24 January 2013 11:54:18PM 4 points [-]

In a book of his, Daniel Dennett appropriates the word "actualism" to mean "the belief that only things that have actually happened, or will happen, are possible." In other words, all statements that are false are not only false, but also impossible: If the coin flip comes up heads, it was never possible for the coin flip to have come up tails.

Taboo "possible." My take: in the absence of real physical indeterminism (which I doubt exists), "possible" is basically an epistemic term meaning "my model does not rule this out." So actualism is wrong, on my view, because it projects the limitations of my mind onto the future causal evolution of the universe.

Comment author: CronoDAS 25 January 2013 03:04:12AM 0 points [-]

Good answer.