If america loses wars with mexico, or conquers canada, or doesn't absorb texas or does just about anything big before 1850, is a civil war still going to happen? What does winning/losing wars do to the timing of a civil war (if any)
If america loses wars with mexico, or conquers canada, or doesn't absorb texas or does just about anything big before 1850, is a civil war still going to happen? What does winning/losing wars do to the timing of a civil war (if any)
Yes and no. Yes, what happened was guaranteed to happen, because it happened and, since there in only one reality all things that did happen happened the only way they could. No, in the future, no event guarantees any other, the chain of causality can diverge in any one of a multiplicity of paths at an almost infinite number of points and everything is a matter of probabilities. Because these vary we can make predictions of the future based on the past, and some can have a high degree of confidence but in the end noone knows what will happen until it does.
AH is a method of speculation, a means to write stories, and has no relationship to actual reality. "Actual" or "virtual" AH doesn't "work" or not in any one way or another because it does not exist.
Ever heard of parralel universes?
It would be odd if you didn't, because you live in one*
*Or 2. Or 3. Or more.
I get what you are saying, but they would be very much reality to someone in said parralel universe.Of course, but they're undemonstrable by definition. You can't talk about an "alternate" reality "in reality" anymore than you can have a square circle.
Under Bell's Many Worlds Theorem everything that can happen, does, but even here the absolutely deterministic nature of the past and the chaotic character of the future remains inviolate. There are an infinite number of Universes where the South won the ACW but we will never see any of them. There are a billion, trillion ways one raindrop can wet our forehead but once it falls we will forever know only one.