tired_time comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 June 2008 04:38AM

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Comment author: tired_time 09 February 2016 09:18:04PM 0 points [-]

Just wanted to add this: “Could” also sometimes mean “is physically possible”. We think we have free will because we don’t know all the physics & facts that causes our brains to end up in the states they end up in. The more physics & facts we know, the less possibilities seem possible to us. E. g. if I know nothing about what’s inside the bowl and then take out a red ball from the bowl, it seems that I could have taken out a yellow ball. However, if I knew in the beginning that there are only red balls in the bowl, I would know that taking out yellow ball was impossible. In the same way, if I don’t know all the details about how my brain works, it seems that I could have decided to eat either banana or jump of the cliff. If I knew everything about how my brain works, I would see that it was physically impossible for me to decide to jump of the cliff. If we knew all the processes perfectly well, we would either always see one possibility, or as many possibilities as there are Everett branches.