The Five Possible Conditions of Existence

If the universe was produced by consciousness, what its producers could have been is constrained. This paper derives five potential explanations for existence and works out what each permits. Beginning from the structure of consciousness — awareness, the orientation that awareness necessitates, and the pursuit of anticipated affect against the cost of obtaining it — it argues that any explanation not involving consciousness is a single explanation, since an unconscious antecedent defers the question without changing it. Where consciousness produced the universe, two variables remain: moral orientation, which admits of two forms because every act either interferes with another's capacity to act or does not, and capacity, bounded or unbounded. Crossed, these yield four conditions. The fourth permits the fullest account, and it is developed here: eternal beings face a problem of supply, since a domain closed to what its inhabitants did not produce eventually furnishes nothing unanticipated. That argument is located against Williams on the tedium of immortality, from which it differs in placing the constraint in the domain rather than in the immortal, and is defended against the principal objections to that account. The universe is then described as an undirected generator of complexity whose products no being could have anticipated, and identified as what such beings would require. One result holds across every conscious condition: a space of control exists whichever obtains. Which condition is actual is not assessed.