Why does anything at all exist?

[Rabb Allah]

Because the demiurge as a consciousness being desire one set of experiences to exist out of an infinite.

[heathendegenerate]

I can't believe you intellectuals turned that question into 5 pages. that's all i have to add.lol

[MindForgedManacle]

As has been said, posing this as a 'why' question is misleading and a problem. Now, I'll try to be as charitable as possible and interpret the question as:

"What is the explanation for the fact that anything exists?"


Once you see that this is a better way of seeing the question, addressing it becomes easier to those who are perplexed by it. Fundamentally, this question assumes a controversial principle known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which basically says that everything has a reason for why it is the case, either in the necessity of its nature or in an external cause. Questions like this seem to be an intractable problem because we're assuming the PSR must apply to everything, that it is an ontological truth. But of course, that doesn't seem to work. After all, what is the reason the that the PSR is true. There seems to be no logical contradiction in asserting that X has no reason or cause for why it is the case; it just is the case.

And further, I'll turn the question on it's head: Why do you expect there shouldn't be anything?
Why do you expect nothingness to be the expected state of affairs (if it can even be called that)? Sure, you might say it's the least arbitrary state of affairs since it has the least possible amount of ontological commitments, but this Occam's Razor objection has no binding power on reality, it's just pragmatic. It says nothing about what has to be the case, in other words, so it seems a useless objection when posed here.


But what kind of answer did you really expect to receive? None will likely satisfy you in the intuitive way we humans like, and those that do apparently satisfy some people, some of the time (usually "Cause GAWD!") are usually fundamentally flawed and don't really answer the question well.

[houseofcantor]

A synchronicity!

Good album.

another suburban family morning
grandmother screaming at the wall

---

Why does anything exist? Because people are stupid.

Once upon a time a person looked at a rock and called it "thing," and the air through which he threw it "no thing;" and because people are stupid, these false dichotomies persist.

Any other questions?

[Hezekiah]

I believe that by asking, "why" you're assuming the universe and everything that exists, exists for a reason. And if you're asking for reason you're assuming there is meaning. And if you're assuming there is meaning, you are suggesting that there was something to give it meaning (since you can't have meaning without a mind to endow it). So if you're looking for a theistic answer you'll most likely get something along the lines of "God created everything so that he could enjoy his creation". If you're looking for a specific reason why he would want to enjoy his creation then you are jumping into types of thiestic worldviews (Christian, Buddhist, and Islam), and that is something you should explore for yourself.