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Possibility and Could-ness — LessWrong

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This post is part of the Solution to "Free Will". Followup to:  Dissolving the Question, Causality and Moral Responsibility Planning out upcoming posts, it seems to me that I do, in fact, need to talk about the word could, as in, "But I could have decided not to rescue that toddler from the burning orphanage." Otherwise, I will set out to talk about Friendly AI, one of these days, and someone will say:  "But it's a machine; it can't make choices, because it couldn't have done anything other than what it did." So let's talk about this word, "could".  Can you play Rationalist's Taboo against it?  Can you talk about "could" without using synonyms like "can" and "possible"? Let's talk about this notion of "possibility".  I can tell, to some degree, whether a world is actual or not actual; what does it mean for a world to be "possible"? I know what it means for there to be "three" apples on a table.  I can verify that experimentally, I know what state of the world corresponds it.  What does

x Possibility and Could-ness — LessWrong Causality Frontpage 69 Possibility and Could-ness by Eliezer Yudkowsky 14th Jun 2008 11 min read 113 69 This post is part of the Solution to "Free Will" . Followup to : Dissolving the Question , Causality and Moral Responsibility Planning out upcoming posts, it seems to me that I do, in fact, need to talk about the word could, as in, "But I could have decided not to rescue that toddler from the burning orphanage." Otherwise, I will set out to talk about Friendly AI, one of these days, and someone will say: "But it's a machine; it can't make choices, bec

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