your ultimate question in philosophy?
Rules; Just give one. If you got an answer to any given, and which are not duplicates of answers you have previously given, please give your shortest answer. You can give a long answers to those secondary arguments.
It’s always this one: Why does anything exist at all?
What is your shortest answer? 
Simple. God made it. 
That’s always been the same too: We don’t know.
Which then begs the question, “Can we know?”
Well, we don’t know that either.
Aside of course from all those here who insist that in fact they already do know: in their head.
And not just the solipsists.
Because if nothing exists, it would have to also be a nothing of itself! And here we are!
Not kidding actually!
For those who don’t understand the proof because of pedantry …
It would also be a lack of a lack of itself???
For those who say nothing isn’t an existent…
Etc…
What can we know?
Thank you for your answer.
But possibly I was referring to Amorphos’ question when:
So my ultimate question in philosophy could possibly be: “What is your shortest answer?”
We can know, “what can we know ?” If we can’t know that, then how did you type it??
Nothing ever exists, at all. We just think it does.
And this disproves existence before essence.
Why would you say that?
Without anything then nothing would be real [=something [prob infinity]].
In a similar fashion to how anything [record players etc] transmits information. There are vague areas ~ we exist in a duality so you will get that category and the category of exacting corroborative info too. As this is a contradiction, the third way denotes a degree of ‘fuzziness’ whereby there is a flow between the duel extremes. Ergo, we can go from a derivative wavelength [physical info from the senses], to say, music or vision in a mind a constructed world [based on that info]. Up to a point the conscious experience is like a TV screen, it is its content where the fuzziness occurs.
So now we have two distinct things; the area of content, and the area of displayed information. As we know this can be fooled in optical illusions, but that is a faculty of how the instrument reads the signals. The projected mind has to play catch up with real-time, and so makes the consciously experienced world as like a 3d gameworld. This means that inherently the instrument is making it up as it goes along, but equally that it is constantly updating. Ergo the inconsistencies are in the process, and not the re-evaluated info.
Oh wait, the brain also continues to project the wrong colours where it thinks colour/shade ‘x’ should be’. So the brain continues to build part false worlds, as long as it fits the gameplan.
Why is it I feel I am going around in circles! 
Here’s one; why do we live in a reality which leads us to ultimate questions?
Because I feel that Shakespeare was right. All the worldly is a stage. Now, if you believe that, then the next line, is not too far of a stretch, ----to be or not to be, ------ our existence is neither in the comprehension of choice, we are thrown into this world, (an existential mantra); we are determined to act out our prescribed roles.
If so, then our preception so, and our knowledge based on them are perfectly determined by our roles.
We are determined to play the prescribed roles, and our so called existence make perfect sense:
To purvey our necessary link between those who came before us, and those, who will come after us.
Our existence is merely a link, a very minute one at that, , to enable the chain of being to proceed.
So you think things exist, but not as they are thought to exist, right?
How minute? Think of what Helena Blavatsky said of the first tangent of life of three hundred trillion and forty billion years, then, you will begin to feel the minute es of individual existence.
Now, if it is existence in itself you are talking about, then the permutations become innumerable even within one life time.
Therefore, it is difficult to think or talk of existence.
It simply doesen’t exist.
Yes and no. They exist as they are thought to exist, therefore, they don’t exist. Cogito ergo non sum.
Would I understand the ultimate answer if you told me what it was
How do I maximize utility?