In the absence of anything, in utter nothingness, there is only the potential. Everything that *can* be, every potential kind of reality, the infinite number of possibilities. In this infinite primordial soup of concepts and worlds, there is one possible world where conscious observation of electromagnetism collapses waves of potential into particles of real. As this imaginary universe plays itself out among the other imaginary universes, in a quantum flux of never being real or unreal, it eventually gets to a point where it creates conscious life forms that can observe it. Upon observation, this fictional reality with these particular properties collapses all of it's potential waveforms from their states of quantum flux into actual particles, with measurable positions and velocities, and the universe emerges, already billions of years old.


Cliff Notes version:
In the absence of what is, there is everything that can be. One of these things that can be, is a universe that creates itself...so it does. And here we are.