Many people seem to think there's something to the idea of the "existence" of the world, but I have come to question this. To be clear this is connected to classic questions like "why is there something rather than nothing", simulation argument, Boltzmann brains, multiverse hypotheses, and so on. Everyone has a strong intuition that we have somehow observed the existence of the world. I think this a superstition.

>If the world didn't exist, we wouldn't be here to observe it. But we do observe it, therefore it exists.

Seems watertight, but I don't think it is. Suppose the world were merely well-defined as the consequence of some system of laws and initial conditions, but did not have the property of "existence". Would the additional property of existence be observable?

It would not: we would still be here within the consequences of the laws and initial conditions, having this inane conversation, whether or not anyone ever "instantiated" the world from an outside perspective. Whether there are 0, 1, or infinite simulated instantiations of our universe makes no difference to us. Nor does the speed they are run at, whether they are put into cold storage for a million years and then restarted, or any other outside fact. We are still here in the consequences of the nature of the world whether or not it exists in some outer frame of reference.

But there's another way we might attack the problem of existence: which is our probability of simulator miracles or exotic instantiations of our present moment like "boltzmann brains". But without inferences from observable existence (caught up in ideas like "measure") these probabilities depend on nothing but made up priors. Metaphysical probabilities like this might as well be undefined. What's even the alternative to betting on the lawfulness and closure of the observable universe?

So contrary to much popular discourse, I think there is no such question as existence, simulation, multiverse, etc. We would observe what we observe regardless of all of that. "Existence" as a predicate only applies *inside* the observable physical universe. When we have the intuition that we can observe that something exists, the counterfactual is an empty universe, not a nonexistent one. We are proving only that the universe has contents, not that it exists.

The only way we would have evidence of metaphysical existence of the universe is if we assume that we ourselves have metaphysical existence independent of the physical universe. So I think all of this is just more variations on the "eternal soul" superstition. (I owe you a thread addressing the question of metaphysical consciousness more directly).

None of this shit matters but it strikes me as somehow psychologically significant that even supposedly atheist physicalist rationalists flirt with such superstitions. What's going on here?

>>2278
> Many people seem to think there's something to the idea of the "existence" of the world, but I have come to question this.

I fail to find any sense in which this question is meaningful. I think we correctly take the existence of the world –– no scare quotes needed –– as given.

If you mean the scare quotes to indicate some technical sense of existence, as opposed to the default intuitive sense, then it's a technical sense that I don't care about, and I'd argue that the rest of us shouldn't care about it either.

> The only way we would have evidence of metaphysical existence of the universe is if we assume that we ourselves have metaphysical existence independent of the physical universe.

On the contrary, one need only assume that one is certain of one's own existence –– which I am –– not that one's existence is independent of the rest of the universe, nor that the soul is eternal.

All a bunch of fallacious reasoning.

>>2279
>All a bunch of fallacious reasoning.
It's strange that you vigorously agree with what I said and then cell it fallacious. I agree that there is no sense of existence that makes any sense other than the usual one that refers to the contents of reality:

>"Existence" as a predicate only applies *inside* the observable physical universe. When we have the intuition that we can observe that something exists, the counterfactual is an empty universe, not a nonexistent one.

But ideas like the simulation hypothesis, multiverse theories, presume to explain an entirely different concept of existence.

>>2281
Simulation hypothesis and multiverse theories do not assert that the universe doesn't exist, but rather that it has a particular structure, even if one different from more typical intuitions. They do not bear on the question of "whether the world exists."