Gentlemen, Thank you for many illuminating replies to the "Why does anything exist?" question. Three are shown below. It's clear that some hold that there is an identity between physical and mathematical existence (although Patrick Leahy may disagree). If so, we can phrase the big WHY as "Why do numbers exist?" (Answer: Because such existence is a logical necessity.)
The question (at least as I mean it) can also be phrased as "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Or perhaps I am really asking "What is the First Cause?" I think the big WHY must be an unanswerable question from a scientific standpoint, and that Leahy must be correct when he says ". . . there is just no answer to the big WHY." Stephen Paul King says it, maybe more rigorously, when he says, "Existence, itself, can not be said to require an explanation for such would be a requirement that there is a necessitate prior to which Existence is dependent upon." Norman Samish ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Stephen Paul King writes: Existence, itself, can not be said to require an explanation for such would be a requirement that there is a necessitate prior to which Existence is dependent upon. Pearce's idea is not new and we have it from many thinkers that the totality of the multiverse must sum to zero, that is the essence of symmetry. It is the actuality of the content of our individual experiences (including all of the asymmetries) that we have to justify. Patrick Leahy writes: I find this a very odd question to be asked on this list. To me, one of the main attractions of the "everything" thesis is that it provides the only possible answer to this question. Viz: as Jonathan pointed out, mathematical objects are logical necessities, and the thesis (at least in Tegmark's formulation) is that physical existence is identical to mathematical existence. Despite this attractive feature, I'm fairly sure the thesis is wrong (so that there is just no answer to the big WHY?), but that's another story. Bruno Marchal writes: You can look at my URL for argument that physical existence emerges from mathematical existence. I have no clues that physical existence could just be equated to mathematical existence unless you attach consciousness to individuated bodies, but how? I can argue that without accepting natural numbers you cannot justify them. So any theory which does not assumes the natural numbers cannot be a theory of everything. Once you accept the existence of natural numbers it is possible to explain how the belief in both math and physics arises. And with the explicit assumption of Descartes Mechanism, in a digital form (the computationalist hypothesis), I think such explanation is unique. Also, it is possible to explain why we cannot explain where our belief in natural numbers come from.
