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 it mean to say that there "could" have been four apples, or "could not" have been four apples? Can you tell me what state of the world corresponds to that, and how to verify it? Can you do it without saying "could" or "possible"?

I know what it means for you to rescue a toddler from the orphanage. What does it mean for you to could-have-not done it? Can you describe the corresponding state of the world without "could", "possible", "choose", "free", "will", "decide", "can", "able", or "alternative"?

One last chance to take a stab at it, if you want to work out the answer for yourself...

Some of the first Artificial Intelligence systems ever built, were trivially simple planners. You specify the initial state, and the goal state, and a set of actions that map states onto states; then you search for a series of actions that takes the initial state to the goal state.

Modern AI planners are a hell of a lot more sophisticated than this, but it's amazing how far you can get by understanding the simple math of everything. There are a number of simple, obvious strategies you can use on a problem like this. All of the simple strategies will fail on difficult problems; but you can take a course in AI if you want to talk about that part.

There's backward chaining: Searching back from the goal, to find a tree of states...

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