[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22C...
Interesting the institute calls itself "Ammonius", not A.M. Monius. And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders.
The Slate article is a republishing of a Lingua Franca article from 2001. Author identification was presumably only added after the author's cover was blown.
The 2000 and 2007 versions of the document don't mention his name. The acknowledgements in the 2010 version mention his brother, Dr. Michael Sanders, and the included review by Zimmerman mentions the author's name.
"Does reality have a purpose? Why are things intelligible at all?" Those questions run into the usual problem when looking for a First Cause:
"God created the world."
"Then who created God?"
"Shut up, kid."
Some philosophers get into this mess by starting from the assumption that there must be something more than the physical universe, so that it somehow "makes sense". With that bias, you get things like this paper. Plus a big chunk of theology.
This view is argued here by Sean Carroll: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02231
Personally, I'm not convinced, although I see the merits of the argument.
Of course as you noted, if you simply assume a parent system you get into an infinite that may or may not be reasonable (the parent system must have a parent, and so on, an infinite stack of parents; this infinite stack of parents also lies in another infinite stack, and so on). I think the only possible alternative to brute fact is to just assume everything exists, to different extents. Then after a lot of handwaving you can sort of explain why the universe is kinda simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
I haven't picked a side, but I have to say I'm more weirded out by the proposition that this is everything that exists than the proposition that essentially everything exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_why_there_is_anythi...
The problem is that popular science and people who don’t know better misunderstand the nature of what physics actually does and tries to shoehorn theories into the questions they want answered.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions like 'What is there?'.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%85%CF%83%CE%B9%CE%B...
Based on the first law of thermodynamics we can figure that a constant quantity of energy (in the form of both energy and mass) has always existed, but then the question remains - why does it exist?
Maybe it was part of a cyclical series of events as you suggests, Big Bang followed by Crunch, and then Bang again. Maybe the String Theorists are eight and it’s cyclic and ekpyrotic, and our universe is just a burst of energy release by interacting Branes. Maybe none of that is right and some other model which better fits observations and predictions will turn out to be better.
One thing to keep in mind is just how tricky it can be to ask seemingly good and simple questions about these things. People come into this with a lot of assumptions and intuition that tends to fail at thes scales. Classic questions that don’t actually mean anything in the formalism are, “What is space expanding into? What came before the Big Bang?” There are other models which accommodate these questions such as eternal inflation in the context of a multiverse, but not in the formalism.
And it's hard to say where we are and what time it is.