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I find this question very perplexing. I can't tell if it arises from a misunderstanding of the concept of "existence" or just a misunderstanding of how importan

• nhaehnle 14y ago
  I agree with you there. The vast majority of "philosophical" questions of type "Does X exist?" are really quite trivial once you clearly define what you mean by "exist". As in your example, the number two doesn't exist in the physical universe. There is no physical object that we can point to and say "This is the number two". It has some physical representations (such as some sequences of electronically encoded bytes in this very comment), sure, but that's not quite the same thing. On the other hand, the number two obviously exists in a mathematical sense. So it really boils down to being precise about what you mean by "existence". It's almost the same with infinities. I say almost, because there is some uncertainty when it comes to physics, e.g. whether the physical universe has discrete or continuous coordinates (and the article mentions singularities, which is a similar problem).
• Evbn 14y ago
  In the real world, infinity is a convenient shorthand for describing a limit process. In the real world, nothing ever reaches its limit exactly, everything is an approximation with at best a finite error range.