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army1987 comments on Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules - Less Wrong
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A way to tell an instantiated mathematical-structure-containing-sentient-beings from an uninstantiated one. (That doesn't sound very different from telling conscious beings from philosophical zombies to me.)
I don't know whether the concept of existence is meaningful. If it is, then something like the following should work:
To determine whether a mathematical structure M is instantiated, examine every thing that exists. If M is the structure of something that you examine, then M is instantiated. Otherwise, M is not instantiated.
Thus, whether the concept of existence is meaningful is the heart of the problem. I don't claim to know that this concept is meaningful. I claim only not to know that it is meaningless.
I think it's more like there are several concepts which share the same label. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
The tree in the forest is a case of various clear concepts (of sound) clearly implying different true answers.
The problem of Being is a problem of finding a clear concept that implies answers that many people find intuitively plausible.
It is more like the problem of being perfectly confident that various mathematical statements are true, while finding it very difficult to say just what it is that those statements are true about.