I can’t remember which, but one of Brian Greene’s books had a line that convinced me that all the configurations do exist simultaneously: “The total loaf exists”. How can anything that crazy-sounding not be right?
I’m not sure that taking the crazy-sound of a given statement as positively correlated with it’s truth is a useful strategy (in isolation). :-)
I guess I’m not sure what “exists” even means in this context. Is this in the general sense that “all mathematical objects exist”? I don’t know what sin(435 rad) is offhand, but I know that it’s defined (i.e. that it exists). But that’s very different from actually instantiating it in the memory of an HP48G.
I accept that all states of the universe are defined, in the mathematical sense (in that, given the parameters of existence, they couldn’t be different than they are—given that F(0)=0 and F(1)=1, F(20) can’t not be 6765). But the mathematical definition of something, and the instantiation of it (or “real existence”) seem to be distinctly different things.
I can’t remember which, but one of Brian Greene’s books had a line that convinced me that all the configurations do exist simultaneously: “The total loaf exists”. How can anything that crazy-sounding not be right?
I’m not sure that taking the crazy-sound of a given statement as positively correlated with it’s truth is a useful strategy (in isolation). :-)
I guess I’m not sure what “exists” even means in this context. Is this in the general sense that “all mathematical objects exist”? I don’t know what sin(435 rad) is offhand, but I know that it’s defined (i.e. that it exists). But that’s very different from actually instantiating it in the memory of an HP48G.
I accept that all states of the universe are defined, in the mathematical sense (in that, given the parameters of existence, they couldn’t be different than they are—given that F(0)=0 and F(1)=1, F(20) can’t not be 6765). But the mathematical definition of something, and the instantiation of it (or “real existence”) seem to be distinctly different things.