Cosmic purpose: held open
Current position (as of 2026-04-18)
On the question of why humans / life exist at all, three possibilities seem roughly available:
- We serve a purpose we can't perceive (simulation / nested reality)
- We're the accidental product of combinatorial chance, with no greater purpose
- Religions are right
Zaid declines to pick. The explicit epistemic commitment: don't default to religion just because you don't have an answer — religion doesn't have the answer either.
From 2026-04-18-nothing-matters:
Even I don't know the answer to that but I don't want to fallback to religious scriptures just because I don't have an answer and religions don't have the answer either.
And the three-possibilities framing (verbatim from the piece):
- we could serve a purpose that we are unware of
- we could be useless with no purpose at all
- religions
Distinguishing this from nearby positions
- purpose-is-constructed is about what to do given no cosmic answer — build meaning through small choices. That's the practical stance.
- This position is about what to think about the cosmic question itself. The epistemic stance.
- Together they compose a coherent posture: cosmic purpose is undecided, and therefore local meaning must be made.
rationality-is-limited is adjacent (the creator-regress shows a limit of rationality) but broader. This position is specifically about the origin-of-existence question.
The creator-regress (key argument)
If everything needs a creator, so does the creator. If the creator can exist uncreated, so can atoms. The argument doesn't disprove God — it shows that the need-for-a-cause intuition doesn't point uniquely to religion.
If humanity came from atoms then where did atoms come from. There must be a creator who created atoms. Fair, but then who created the creator? and if the creator always existed then why can't the atoms?
That's the paradox where most religious debates wobble around.
The two metaphors the piece leans on
WhatsApp message — a message has no awareness of the world outside the phone; if it had consciousness, it would think the sender is its god. We might be in the same epistemic position w.r.t. a layer above us.
Beehive on a tree — the tree-owner cares about fruit; the beehive is an accidental side-effect; the bees never know they're inside someone else's system. Earth could be that beehive.
Both point at: we can't tell from inside. A candidate theme for later promotion if future pieces develop it.
Related positions
- purpose-is-constructed — the practical counterpart to this epistemic stance
- rationality-is-limited — the creator-regress is an instance of rationality hitting its ceiling
- no-singular-self — similar move: refuse to default to the comfortable answer
Related themes
History
| Date | Position | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-18 | As above | First articulated in Nothing matters, we humans are nothing |