Why Does the World Exist?: One Man's Quest for the Big Answer

by Jim Holt

“The truth is very different from what we are inclined to believe,

Leibniz

Then you would expect the world to be a very good world. And if the part of it you observed didn’t look especially good, you would conclude—again, like Leslie—that it must be just a tiny bit of a larger reality that, on the whole, was very good—infinitely good, in fact.

Going from how to why was, I discovered, the essence of Parfit’s approach.

Cosmic possibilities,” Parfit says, “cover everything that ever exists,