I have long been suspicious of the idea of possibilities that are not actual. And if something is in fact actual, there is no point in calling it a mere possibility. It might make sense to dispense with serious talk about the possible and to see reality as simply the actual and the exclusion of the impossible. Maybe anything not actual is simply impossible or best regarded as the false.

Obviously, this relates to questions of determinism. If strict determinism holds, talk of non-actual possibilities seems silly. But real indeterminism, free will, and the like, would seem to involve real possibilities not becoming actualities. But what does that mean?

When we think about possibilities, are we just demonstrating our uncertainty? Is this just a question of our imperfect mental models? When philosophers talk about possible worlds and such, especially if they claim that such and such is indeed possible, I wonder how they think they can know this. Such imagined worlds would probably involve contradictions. We just aren't smart enough to simulate a universe mentally to see if the world in question works out.

We would like to imagine such things being possible as a world without violence, disease, disaster, and nipples on men. If God were to exist, we like to think, he would surely create a more perfect world, one without such obvious flaws. We could do better, we like to think.

But it seems to me that our existence depends critically on many factors that make violence, disease, and male nipples (oft-cited "evidence" that the world has flaws) in our world inevitable. We couldn't be humans and at the same time not have violence without having a world containing some deep structural flaws, deep violations of logic and causality and such. Such a world wouldn't even be amenable to scientific investigation. Such a world would lack a consistent and unbroken history.

And can God lie? Could the world basically be a lie? Can God make A and not-A both be the case?

Stories can be such that they have holes and can't actually work. False stories, if investigated, will reveal inconsistencies. Fictional worlds can be created top-down and surface-deep such that they have whatever coarse-grained features we like to imagine. But none of them, I would argue, could be actual worlds. To come up with a world that could actually be real, one would have to be capable of simulating it from the ground up, from the beginning. And then one doesn't get to be very choosy about the outcomes and surface features!

Can actual reality contain faults? Or could we actually reside, finally and all the way to the bottom, or bottomlessness if you will, in a false or non-real world? I think not.

People tend to laugh at Leibniz for calling this the best of all possible worlds. But I am not so quick to laugh. Perhaps it is! Perhaps what actually exists is all that is possible period. Perhaps there is only the true, the logically consistent, period. And then it isn't a world that needs a creator, is it? It is simply what is true. It doesn't make sense to me to think that God is needed to make the case what cannot be otherwise.

The actual world is likely also the necessary. We probably don't have a world that is contingent and arbitrary and therefore seemingly in need of a necessary being who creates it by decree without necessity. That is a strange line of thought anyway, isn't it? The world is then something like a whim with no reason for its being, something once again lacking explanation or even being intrinsically unexplainable or even being sort of causeless. If God must create it, if some reason for it forces his hand, then the necessity is unbroken, the world being continuous with and a part of it.

I suspect that a contingent, arbitrary world in need of a creator with more solid foundations paints a picture of a God that is essentially a liar, an artificer. And this would seem to better fit a demiurge than our idea of God!

A world that could actually exist, it seems to me, is likely also necessarily a true one through and through, all the way down, without any gaps. Such a world also is necessarily a necessary one, isn't it?

With something like 1+1=2, it seems that it is just true. Someone didn't make it so. It doesn't depend on something arbitrary. Perhaps it is the same with our world, this just being a more complex equation of sorts, a rich expression of the law of identity.

I find it a little strange that anyone could take seriously, after some thought on the matter, the idea that things purely arbitrary can be real. Such things would be causeless, irrational, unintelligible, foundationless, and so on, downright vaporous! How could one find oneself literally being such a thing, a thing unconnected to its world?

Certainly, one might inhabit a false world in the sense that what one takes for reality is false and lacks deep consistency. An inhabitant of The Matrix comes to mind. But such a being, beyond their knowledge, must be part the real world somehow. Even if you yourself are part of a computer simulation and have no body outside of the computer, what you actually are has to be real. You have to somehow "sit" in final reality. I would go further and say that you must be inseparable from it. You must, in the end, actually be the very final deepest ground. It is unbroken. There are no beings apart from it. You are not created, not an inhabitant. That which is you finally, that which actually finds itself existing, is simply that which is.

Supposing that you are "just" a simulation and therefore "not real", it isn't that you actually are not real or are not living in a real world. Rather, you simply misunderstand your situation and your nature. The problem is epistemic, not ontological. Something non-existent cannot find itself being fooled that it exists.

Whatever you think you are, there is something that you "really are" and which itself "really is", something beneath the appearances. Maybe you are the operations of a computer. (I don't actually subscribe to any simulation hypothesis.) Nay, you are the computer itself performing said operations. Nay, you are such and such behaving as a computer. And so on, down to the bottom. And whatever it is that you really are deep down, you are something that really is of such a nature that it can find itself in just the predicament you find yourself in, having the experience of believing yourself a human in a world such as this one. That such an experience as you are having is a real experience is of no doubt. And perhaps it is not possible that you would not find yourself in this situation. It is just part of what is without contradiction, what is simply true and therefore necessarily actual.

Sense? Nonsense? What do you think?