Our ultimate goal was that virtual world objects are indistinguishable from real world objects.
Even children as young as 15 months show few signs of what Alan Leslie has termed 'representational abuse,' that is, there is little indication that the child comes overtly to believe that actual-world objects have or will come to have features of the pretend objects that they serve to represent (Leslie 1987).
Hence, unlike trace actualism, there are no such vestiges in the actual world of objects that are not actual but only could have been.
The actual world, the object that is normally called the cosmos or the universe, and the many nonactual worlds constitute the realm of "possible worlds".
But nothing that has been said rules out the existence of recombinations of the actual world — rearrangements of its objects and universals — that include such states of affairs.
Indeed even the actual world is an abstract object for Plantinga, since it has no center of mass, it is neither a concrete object nor a mereological sum of concrete objects and, like the state of affairs of Ford's being ingenious, has no spatial parts at all (2003a, 107).
Similarly, if possible worlds require an active construction (say, Ludwig Wittgenstein's imaginary rearrangements of objects drawn from the actual world), then the very process of construction ensures that there are some concrete objects in every possible world.
The problem of the underdetermination of nonexistent objects in the actual world is also broached in Nolan 2008 (191 193).
What we call the actual world is one of these concrete objects, the spatiotemporally connected universe we inhabit.
To conceive of a world W in which (i) is true is to conceive of a world in which we (in the actual world) attribute beliefs about mind-independent objects to counterfactual versions of us (CVs) in W. But given CT, we must now also conceive of W as featuring mind-independent objects with which these CVs interact.
Perhaps it would also be an undesirable brute fact if (per impossibile) a maximal world with fewer objects than the actual world existed; what would explain God's realization of a smaller maximal collection when a larger maximal collection is possible (see Ip33s2)?
