Does the Universe only exist because we humans are here to observe it? Is this a valid, answerable question?

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My take on this is that the concept of ‘existence’ is not monolithic. It has components. Something can have physical presence, it can have temporal presence. Do the characters in a book exist? I’d say they have one of the components of existence.

When I meditate on this long enough, I realize that as the definition for ‘existence’ requires humans to hash out, if there weren’t humans around to argue over whether something exists or not, then nothing does, simply because nobody would think to call what the universe is doing, ‘existing.’

Let’s take an analogous concept. When you cook, you make molecular changes to food in order to make it more palatable. If you made similar molecular changes to, say, a handful of dirt, then you’d be doing chemistry, not cooking. What’s the difference between cooking and chemistry, especially at the margins? What if there was someone that liked to eat dirt cakes? You’d need a bunch of humans to argue about it before you could work out robust distinctions. We call making meth “cooking” even though to most eyes it’s more like chemistry. Who gets to define the word?

This is how law works. A bunch of people are working out a process to decide how people should behave. A weird concept in law is human rights. Most democratic peoples believe in human rights, but many people who know how the sausage is made can’t help but think the exercise of codifying universal human rights is a bit silly. How can a thing be universal if there is no universal police force around to enforce them? No world government around to make sure that all the individual state governments don’t trample on rights.

Most people believe that people should have rights such as freedom of speech, but actually turning that into reality is really daunting.

That’s along the lines I think about when people ask questions like this. Concepts that seem fundamental, simple, and intuitive are in practice anything but. Things get real messy around the edges.

To me your question reads like: Does the Star Wars universe exist?