🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct6.155930.2363@guinness.idbsu.edu>, holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:

|> Where I do find talk of possible worlds reasonable is in the
|> discussion of the physical world that we live in.  Since I think that
|> the physical world is a subset of the logical universe, I find it
|> reasonable to suppose that alternate physical worlds (all possible
|> ones) _actually exist_ (in exactly the same sense that ours does).

It's this "same sense" that bothers me a bit.

Can I get to another one of them?  How?  Or am *I* already in (some of)
them?  Is it really *me*?  Can we communicate with the populations of
these possible worlds (as we can with the populations of our own)?

|> Such worlds provide an actual model for Kripke's semantics for modal
|> logic, for discussions restricted to the physical world; in the
|> internal language of this model, they are "possible worlds".  It is
|> probably an abuse of terminology to call them "possible worlds"
|> without reference to this model.  I don't think that one of them is
|> especially worthy of notice, except for the fact that I (and all of
|> _us_) are in it.

But isn't this a big "except"?  As in "The difference between P and -P
is not worthy of notice except for the fact that P is true and -P is
false"?

|> In an absolute sense (relative to the _logical_ universe) I am _not_ a
|> possible worlds realist; I think that there is one actual logical
|> universe.  However, there are various ways to describe the actual

I think the word "actual" is then a no-op here.  What is its sense?










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