When I studied philosophy in Heidelberg, I read about the logic of possible worlds. Everything possible was also real, only not accessible to me at the moment. This was an answer to a fundamental problem in propositional logic, namely that an “if…, then” sentence—with a false premise and a true conclusion—was true as a whole.
In the Western Enlightenment, we find in Leibniz the assumption that we live in the best of all possible worlds. To put it extremely briefly, this was a proof of God’s existence. Everything is reflected in everything. He called this monads.
Yet the possibility of all being is already contained in the origin of being—how could it be otherwise? The idea of progress, that there was nothing at the beginning and somewhere things keep becoming more and better, is not rationally comprehensible, although it seems to be the fundamental assumption of a large number of scientific theories.
We do not live in the best of all possible worlds; nor do we live in a world of progress. We are part of a being that has always already contained all possible worlds.
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