This terrific piece feels less like an argument than an honest tracing of a boundary. The line “meaning, for me, will be built closer to home” feels earned, not reactive, and I respect that. For me, meaning can be found in awe, and this essay reads like someone deciding, thoughtfully, what the role and limits of awe are for them.
You’re right that cosmology is inference under constraints. There is no cosmic movie, only reconstruction from delayed light within a single light cone. Relativity, horizons, and causal structure don’t just complicate the picture; they define its limits.
Where I’d make a distinction is between cosmology as “storytelling” and cosmology as disciplined inference. The field doesn’t claim a view from outside the universe; it works explicitly within those limits, using conditions and statistical models that are modifiable. Redshift really does encode complex histories, but modern cosmology increasingly treats that complexity as something to model and cross-check, not something to gloss over.
Still, your deeper point lands. Even a complete cosmology would not deliver a source of ultimate meaning, only relations and patterns within the system. In that sense, the Nietzsche parallel feels right: not a failure of science, but a recognition of where its explanatory power ends.
Choosing to build meaning closer to home doesn’t diminish cosmology; it simply refuses to overburden it. If cosmology gives awe, scale, and clarity about limits, and meaning is then grounded elsewhere, that feels less like resignation and more a clear-eyed reallocation of attention.
Thanks for writing something that takes both science and meaning seriously enough to know where each one stops.
This terrific piece feels less like an argument than an honest tracing of a boundary. The line “meaning, for me, will be built closer to home” feels earned, not reactive, and I respect that. For me, meaning can be found in awe, and this essay reads like someone deciding, thoughtfully, what the role and limits of awe are for them.
You’re right that cosmology is inference under constraints. There is no cosmic movie, only reconstruction from delayed light within a single light cone. Relativity, horizons, and causal structure don’t just complicate the picture; they define its limits.
Where I’d make a distinction is between cosmology as “storytelling” and cosmology as disciplined inference. The field doesn’t claim a view from outside the universe; it works explicitly within those limits, using conditions and statistical models that are modifiable. Redshift really does encode complex histories, but modern cosmology increasingly treats that complexity as something to model and cross-check, not something to gloss over.
Still, your deeper point lands. Even a complete cosmology would not deliver a source of ultimate meaning, only relations and patterns within the system. In that sense, the Nietzsche parallel feels right: not a failure of science, but a recognition of where its explanatory power ends.
Choosing to build meaning closer to home doesn’t diminish cosmology; it simply refuses to overburden it. If cosmology gives awe, scale, and clarity about limits, and meaning is then grounded elsewhere, that feels less like resignation and more a clear-eyed reallocation of attention.
Thanks for writing something that takes both science and meaning seriously enough to know where each one stops.
Given your AI background I do hope you will read and comment on my latest essay.