Cyan2 comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Cyan2 20 June 2008 03:38:00PM 1 point [-]

Joseph Knecht, where you go wrong is here:

...when we... ask what it means for a state to be reachable, the answer circularly depends on the concept of possibility, which is what we are supposedly explaining. A reachable state is just a state that it is possible to reach.

A state labelled "reachable" by a human may in fact be impossible as a matter of physics. Many accidental injuries and deaths follow from this fact. It is as a result of evolution that a given human's label "reachable" has any relation to reality at all.