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mwengler comments on L-zombies! (L-zombies?) - Less Wrong
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Why would somebody care about the properties of things that do not exist?
I think this is a real question, an interesting question, so don't downvote it because you think I am being flippant. Instead think about why you care about the properties of things that don't exist. I think anybody who cares about the properties of something that doesn't exist is equivocating on the meaning of doesn't exist: they are thinking something that doesn't exist is actually something, but with its "I exist" checkbox left unchecked. As opposed to the idea that something that doesn't exist really just doesn't exist: it has no checkboxes. Existence is not a property of something that it can either have or not have. If it doesn't exist it doesn't have properties.
I guess I do care a little, just a LOT less than I do about the properties of things that do exist.
See counter factual mugging and related situations in decision theory.
Can you be more specific? There are few more or less trivial answers -- e.g. a model of some real process does not exist (it's just a model in my head) but I'm interested in its properties because the model is useful for, say, forecasting reality. Or, for another example, I might be imagining a thing that I will build and, again, the reason to be interested in its properties is obvious.