Why is there a world? Even if this reality is mere appearance, dream, maya, it would still be something. There could have been nothing, as Leibniz famously observed. So, why this? And why one with conscious beings in it?
We don’t have agreed-upon answers to this question. The responses that have been proposed range from questioning the question, to a scientific brute-fact answer (“It just is”), to religious and otherwise supernatural half-answers, or non-answers.
Perhaps somethingness is the default natural state, hence not needing to be explained. However, how could we know that, since it seems to us that, on the face of things, nothingness is just as likely?
Science cannot give us such ultimate answers. A Big Bang presupposes something already, albeit in a compact energy state. In other…
