“Be in this universe”(1) vs “be mathematically possible” should cover most cases, though other times it might not quite match either of those and be much harder to explain.
“This universe” being defined as everything that could interact with the speaker, or with something that could interacted with the speaker, etc. ad infinitum.
Defining ‘existence’ by using ‘interaction’ (or worse yet the possibility of interaction) seems to me to be trying to define something fundamental by using something non-fundamental.
As for “mathematical possibility”, that’s generally not what most people mean by existence—unless Tegmark IV is proven or assumed to be true, I don’t think we can therefore taboo it in this manner...
Defining ‘existence’ by using ‘interaction’ (or worse yet the possibility of interaction) seems to me to be trying to define something fundamental by using something non-fundamental.
I’m not claiming they’re ultimate definitions—after all any definition must be grounded in something else—but at least they disambiguate which meaning is meant, the way “acoustic wave” and “auditory sensation” disambiguate “sound” in the tree-in-a-forest problem. For a real-world example of such a confusion, see this, where people were talking at cross-purposes because by “no explanation exists for X” one meant ‘no explanation for X exists written down anywhere’ and another meant ‘no explanation for X exists in the space of all possible strings’.
As for “mathematical possibility”, that’s generally not what most people mean by existence—unless Tegmark IV is proven or assumed to be true, I don’t think we can therefore taboo it in this manner...
Sentences such as “there exist infinitely many prime numbers” don’t sound that unusual to me.
I’ve not yet found a good way to do that. Do you have one?
“Be in this universe”(1) vs “be mathematically possible” should cover most cases, though other times it might not quite match either of those and be much harder to explain.
“This universe” being defined as everything that could interact with the speaker, or with something that could interacted with the speaker, etc. ad infinitum.
Defining ‘existence’ by using ‘interaction’ (or worse yet the possibility of interaction) seems to me to be trying to define something fundamental by using something non-fundamental.
As for “mathematical possibility”, that’s generally not what most people mean by existence—unless Tegmark IV is proven or assumed to be true, I don’t think we can therefore taboo it in this manner...
I’m not claiming they’re ultimate definitions—after all any definition must be grounded in something else—but at least they disambiguate which meaning is meant, the way “acoustic wave” and “auditory sensation” disambiguate “sound” in the tree-in-a-forest problem. For a real-world example of such a confusion, see this, where people were talking at cross-purposes because by “no explanation exists for X” one meant ‘no explanation for X exists written down anywhere’ and another meant ‘no explanation for X exists in the space of all possible strings’.
Sentences such as “there exist infinitely many prime numbers” don’t sound that unusual to me.