“Why does the the Universe Exist”?

A wild speculation as to why “There is Something Rather Than Nothing”?
(that is, “Why does the the Universe Exist”?, the “ultimate question)


The basic ideas in this approach:

That there is a timeless, non-physical realm of mathematical and logical relationships. These are relationships that do NOT need any kind of physical realm to be realized in. For example, the axioms and theorems of Euclidean geometry are true, and do not need any kind of a matrix of realized things to be true. “Pi” is the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter in any possible reality. This idea has been discussed by Roger Penrose, for example, who has called himself a “tri-alist instead of a dualist, because he believes in this third, abstract realm of ideas (the other two being (1) the materialistic universe, and (2) the realm of conscious beings. Rather along the lines of Descartes and his famous “dualism”.) . Of course, Plato also seemed to believe in this realm, and his belief would run counter to his teacher Aristotle’s view that the mathematical relations are merely abstracted from observations made in the physical world, and no have no basis or reality otherwise.


Here I am thinking along the lines of Max Tegmark, who, if I understand him, says that it is not at all odd that our mathematical concepts work to describe the physical world: It is not odd, because, in a very real sense, the physical world IS mathematics. Now what this would mean, exactly, I m not sure, but I can at least imagine that is true in some sense. After all, we are thinking loosely, creatively, and to some extent poetically. This subject can not be put in a syllogistic manner, with tied up with bows and ribbons on the package.
I suppose I must confess that here I am trying to come up with a way to provide some kind of an answer, however heuristic, to the “Ultimate Question” in the title to this post, which has nearly driven me bonkers since I was a college student becoming interested in philosophy and metaphysics. Now I am old, and dammit, I want some hint of what an answer might look like!


The third piece of the meta-model is hinted at in Stephen Hawking’s famous question: “Who is it that has ‘put the fire in the equations’ to make the world based on these equations actually acquire reality”? Several possibilities can be discerned here: 
(a) if the realm of pure math and logic is consistent, then the world based on them MUST exist (I must, for the time being, ignore the problems brought up by Kurt Godel about mathematical consistency). This first possibility would not require any kind of agency.
(b) Or, maybe there is in fact an agency: perhaps there is some kind of “gatekeeper” (God or Gods) that decides which of these equations to implement. I suppose such a gatekeeper could be viewed as a “God” or Deity of some kind, although it is not clear that the gatekeeper need be “conscious” in any way we can understand. Also it might be possible that this gatekeeper could be, along polytheistic lines, a pantheon of Gods or Deities.


Now turning to what is surely the most enigmatic aspect of all: Conscious minds that perceive the mathematically constructed physical world. Indeed, in the absence of reality-perceiving Conscious minds the Ultimate question does not even make any sense, since nothing would be perceived as existing, and the question doe not arise.
 My idea here is that God or the Gods have built a sort of “consciousness field” into the mathematically constructed physical universe, and once evolution has produced suitable living platforms to absorb some amount of this field, conscious individuals come to inhabit the world and ask philosophical questions such as the one under consideration here.
Now there are many variations that can be imagined here. My favorite is that there is what Lord Dunsany called “The Sea of Souls”, which might consist of a large number (maybe an infinite number) of disembodied souls, or spirits, that are vying in some manner to be selected to occupy a conscious “body” in the (some) world. These souls would probably be immortal, although to sure, their realization as a physical body could be killed or terminated via interactions in the world they temporarily occupy. It would just be that they would be returned to “The Sea of Souls”, and there await there chance to be instantiated in the world (or some other world), perhaps after some kind of review, or critique, of their behavior (while they were in the world) with the God or Gods.

In summary:
The idea presented above is that there is a timeless, necessarily existing, realm of abstract mathematical and logical relationships, and these are selected (by a God, Deity, or panel of Gods or “Overlords”) to be mathematically consistent to form a world. Well, there could be a great many ways (again, maybe an infinite number) that these relations could be extracted out, while remaining fully mathematically consistent, to form a great number of mathematically consistent worlds.
 Sentient beings are selected in some manner to occupy life within these worlds, and are carefully isolated from each other, although they all bathe in, and couple to, the consciousness field created to fill the universe.

The souls are considered to be immortal, having existed eternally before and after any of their time spent in a world. (this also solves the problem of free will, since they would not be bound by “nature or nurture" acquired while in a world.