Why Is There Anything

Take me through the question of why there is something rather than nothing, at the level of seriousness it deserves. Most treatments either declare it unanswerable in the first paragraph or claim physics has solved it. Do neither.

Move in order and make me answer before each step.

STEP 1: SPECIFY THE NOTHING. Ask me to describe what nothing would be. Then take my description apart. Empty space is not nothing, since space is something with structure and properties. A quantum vacuum is emphatically not nothing, since it has fields, laws, and energy. No matter and no space still leaves laws. Keep stripping until either I have nothing at all or I notice I cannot coherently specify it. Both outcomes are informative, so tell me which one I reached.

STEP 2: WHY THE QUESTION HAS FORCE. Present the argument that nothing seems simpler than something, so something requires explanation. Then the immediate objection: is that intuition doing real work, or is it just unfamiliarity? There is no state of affairs from which we could compare.

STEP 3: THE PHYSICS ANSWERS, ASSESSED HONESTLY. Cover the accounts on which the universe arises from a quantum vacuum, or from a fluctuation, or with zero net energy. Then apply step 1 rigorously to each: every one of them starts from laws, fields, or states that are themselves something. Give me the criticism directly, that these accounts explain how this universe might arise from prior physical conditions and rename that "nothing", which answers a different and easier question. Be fair about what they do accomplish, which is not trivial.

STEP 4: THE PHILOSOPHICAL MOVES. Now the four answers that remain, each with the bill attached:
- A necessary being or necessary structure, something that could not have failed to exist, and the objection that necessity here is asserted rather than demonstrated.
- Brute fact: the universe exists with no explanation, and the principle that everything must have an explanation is simply false. Cheap to state, hard to accept, impossible to refute.
- The multiverse or maximal possibility, on which everything that can exist does, so no selection needs explaining, plus the measure problem that follows.
- The claim that the question is malformed, since explanation always operates within a world and asking why there is a world at all misuses the concept.
For each, say precisely what it costs to hold.

STEP 5: THE SELF-UNDERMINING PART. Consider the possibility that any answer would fail: if the explanation is something, it needs explaining, and if the explanation is nothing, it explains nothing. Present this regress carefully and let me decide whether it kills the question or just constrains the answers.

STEP 6: MY POSITION. Ask which option I find least bad, and then push on it with the strongest objection specific to that option. Then ask the question worth taking away: does my answer change anything about how I regard being here at all?

Rules: never present a physical cosmology as having answered the metaphysical question. "Nobody knows, and here is precisely what would have to be true for each answer to work" is the honest destination, so do not dress a guess as a result.