Besides its use in explicating the notion of can, the
automaton representation of the world is very suited for illustrating
notions of causality. For, we may say that subautomaton p caused
the condition 
in state s, if changing the output of p would
prevent . In fact the whole idea of a system of interacting
automata is mainly a formalization of the commonsense notion of
causality.
The automaton representation can be used to explicate certain counterfactual conditional sentences. For example, we have the sentence, ``If another car had come over the hill when you just passed, there would have been a head-on collision''. We can imagine an automaton representation in which whether a car came over the hill is one of the outputs of a traffic subautomaton. [Costello and McCarthy 1999] discusses useful counterfactuals, like the above that are imbedded in a description of a situation and have consequences. One use is that they permit learning from an experience you didn't quite have and would rather not have.