I'm perplexed as to why this video has so many likes. Tim Maudlin is indeed an excellent and skilled philosopher, and his arguments and lectures usually merit serious consideration, but on *this* issue he really dropped the ball.

He starts off by saying that this question of whether absolute non-being is possible-- of why there is existence rather than non-existence-- lacks a satisfactory answer. There just *isn't* a satisfactory answer to give or receive, says Maudlin.

Then, after some prompting from Kuhn, Maudlin tells us that mathematical and moral values could not be different no matter how different the physical world were. This leads Kuhn to suggest that these are therefore "necessary" truths, and Maudlin seems to agree that they are.

This then leads Kuhn to suggest that Maudlin is, on his own view, therefore committed to a category of "necessary existence." Here Maudlin seems to get confused as to what Kuhn means. But this isn't a confusing question; the question is whether there is any actual aspect of reality that has to exist and could fail to exist, and relatedly, whether there are truths that cannot be fail to obtain. If Maudlin isn't confident one way or another, he could have just said that. There is a fact of the matter, even if we disagree on it.

If Maudlin says "no" -- if he thinks that there isn't an aspect of reality that is non-contingent/necessary -- then he would be insinuating (if not outright asserting) that the contingent physical realm just IS the totality of reality.

In that case, the question becomes whether the physical realm *has* to exist-- whether the non-existence of physical reality is possible. Here Maudlin seems confused by what we mean by "possible," but, as before, this really shouldn't be confusing. Another phrasing would be the following: Could *all* physical reality *fail* to exist? This question is coherent/intelligible, even if Maudlin isn't confident in any answer.

If Maudlin wants to say that, no, physical reality could not fail to exist, then he'd be claiming that the answer to the original question -- why is there anything at all -- is to be found within the nature of physical reality itself; i.e. that physical reality, or at least some aspect of physical reality, exists by a necessity of its own nature. This answer is intelligible, even if false. If Maudlin goes this route then he appears to be "satisfied" with it.

This is arguably implausible though. Leaving aside questions concerning the finitude of the past (which WLC dwells on), one could still argue like Leibniz or Pruss or Feser that physical reality is contingent even if its past is beginningless. See Pruss's chapter in the 2009 Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology and also chapter 2 of Ed Feser's 2017 book "Five Proofs." Perhaps they're mistaken though. I won't spell it all out here.

  Going back to Maudlin's idea that moral and mathematical values are somehow "not physical" and "couldn't be different" even if physics were different, this notion seems to imply that indeed some aspect of reality *is* non-physical and non-contingent, otherwise Maudlin would just be wrong when he says that these truths wouldn't change regardless of how much physical reality were changed. Kuhn sees this, although his way of expressing it may have confused Maudlin. He hints at it by asking Maudlin whether the laws of physics *have* to exist. He wants to know whether moral and mathematical truths would "exist" in the *absence* of all physical reality, including the laws of physics. If there were NO physical reality at all -- if there were NO laws of physics, no subatomic particles at all (no quarks, no photons, etc), no strings at all, no fields at all, etc. -- would mathematical or moral truths still exist? Would *anything* still exist?

Maudlin may not be confident in any answer, but the question is intelligible and there is a fact of the matter. And if he wants to argue that *none* of the answers are viable then he needs to engage Pruss and Feser on the theistic side and perhaps someone like Vilenkin on the atheistic side.