On 7/8/09, Andy Latto <andy.latto@pobox.com> wrote:
... My opinion is that philosophers worry to much about existence questions that are like the second sort of mathematical existence problem, and the appropriate answer is "who cares? there are equally good descriptions of the universe, with the same predictive power, that include and that fail to include those entities."
To put it in a nutshell --- does existence exist? The mathematician is a magician --- with a wave of a stick of chalk, he incants a definition, and behold --- a new concept is summoned into existence. End of discussion. An empiricist (Dr. Johnson) must take a more sensorily committed line, and give the nearest boulder a good kick --- this sort of existence is implicit in the term "qualia" used earlier. But the existence of God, or of the (physical) quantum, or of various flavours of number --- Kronecker apocryphally observed that "God created the integers, the rest is the work of Man" --- is surely a question involving emotional and social factors. They are what Dawkins calls "memes" (what was wrong with "ideas", I wonder?) --- and as such, they plainly do exist, simply because enough people believe in them --- though this situation may well be temporary. In addition, at a sufficiently fine level of detail, individual perceptions of a meme will vary --- some smoothing process may become necessary to deliver an agreed (some hope!) "mean meme". Questions of empirical verifiability or internal consistency are irrelevant. Naive sets exist because Naive Set Theory exists, and that in turn because it is quite useful (even though it's wrong!). The aether exists because Newtonian mechanics exists, ditto. Fred Lunnon