I believe that “exists” doesn’t mean anything fundamentally significant (in senses other than referring to presence of a property of some fact; or referring to the physical world; or its technical meanings in logic), so I don’t understand what it would mean for various (abstract) things to exist to greater or lower extent.
That would require understanding alternatives, which I currently don’t. The belief in question is mostly asserting confusion, and as such it isn’t much use, other than as a starting point that doesn’t purport to explain what I don’t understand.
No, I won’t see that in itself as a reason to be wary, since as I said repeatedly I don’t know how to parse the property of something being real in this sense.
Anyone who has positive accounts of existentness to put forth, I’d like to hear them. (E.g., Eliezer has talked about this related existentness-like-thing that has do with being in a causal graph (being computed), but I’m not sure if that’s just physicalist intuition admitting much confusion or if it’s supposed to be serious theoretical speculation caused by interesting underlying motivations that weren’t made explicit.)
You don’t think whether or not the Tegmark Level 4 multiverse exists could ever have any decision theoretic import?
I believe that “exists” doesn’t mean anything fundamentally significant (in senses other than referring to presence of a property of some fact; or referring to the physical world; or its technical meanings in logic), so I don’t understand what it would mean for various (abstract) things to exist to greater or lower extent.
Okay. What is your probability for that belief? (Not that I expect a number, but surely you can’t be certain.)
That would require understanding alternatives, which I currently don’t. The belief in question is mostly asserting confusion, and as such it isn’t much use, other than as a starting point that doesn’t purport to explain what I don’t understand.
Fine. So you agree that we should be wary of any hypotheses of which the reality of abstract objects is a part?
No, I won’t see that in itself as a reason to be wary, since as I said repeatedly I don’t know how to parse the property of something being real in this sense.
Personally, I am always wary of hypotheses I don’t know how to parse.
Anyone who has positive accounts of existentness to put forth, I’d like to hear them. (E.g., Eliezer has talked about this related existentness-like-thing that has do with being in a causal graph (being computed), but I’m not sure if that’s just physicalist intuition admitting much confusion or if it’s supposed to be serious theoretical speculation caused by interesting underlying motivations that weren’t made explicit.)