Sometimes at a certain stage of life, questions set aside in earlier years return and demand attention. Perhaps the questions were inexpedient for a younger person to address in the busy decades of householding and career building. Perhaps it seemed foolish for someone with little life experience to pretend to answer big questions about existence. Perhaps there simply wasn’t time.

Beginning the last third of my life, with householding and career behind me, the big questions somehow remain, waiting for an older version of myself to address them. And since I have both more and less time, I am asking those big questions again:

• What is consciousness?
• What is death?
• What is time?
• What is real?

We know more than we think we do

These are fundamental human questions about existence. I ask them not because I am particularly qualified to do so, but because like so many others I am a human observer. And in that role I have concluded — surprisingly — that our species has learned a thing or two about life, including things most of us do not know we have learned.

As a starting point, we have learned one big thing about what is real—that humans no longer need supernatural explanations for things we do not understand about the world, the universe, or our existence. The components of understanding are readily available in the physical world around us. And from those components, and the work of physicists, cosmologists, ontologists, and other scientists to reveal and explain the physical world and what is real, we as a species are coming to learn that some of life’s biggest mysteries may be not so mysterious at all.

A draft framework for a consensus universal cosmology

Based on what I think our species now understands, I will try to lay out a human cosmology. It is a philosophical cosmology, not a scientific cosmology. But it is informed by my small knowledge of scientific cosmology. Science has made great strides in explaining the universe. My goal here is to describe how scientific discovery and mundane human observation can converge to form the basis of a cosmology of the universe.[1]

It is universal because it is grandiose. It goes beyond what scientific cosmology can explain today. For that reason some will say it is a religious cosmology. If so, it is a religious cosmology with components grounded in science or deductions from what is known in science.

It is consensus because it is not primarily of my own making. I am not the only foolish human to ask big questions and try to answer them. In fact, I believe there is an emerging consensus among many foolish humans on these topics, both the questions and the possible answers. We may have learned enough already that simply teasing answers from our shared base of knowledge could help define a consensus around some big human questions.

It is a draft framework because it describes a structure and an approach to a work in progress. It consists of notes and short essays on a philosophical cosmology more than completed work.

What might be true

Humans have necessarily incomplete knowledge, but we are learning and may be further along than we realize. With that possibility in mind, I hope to play the scribe and write down what might be true about some of life’s biggest questions.

That is my goal. It may seem every bit as foolish now as it seemed decades ago. It may seem presumptuous and arrogant, or even ridiculous. But one benefit of age is the willingness to take ridiculous as a challenge. So in the words of Wallace Stevens, “Let be be finale of seem.”

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[1] Perhaps more correctly it could be called a theory of reality or a universal ontology of what is real. But “cosmology” with all its historical, philosophical, and religious connotations seems a more fitting title for a grandiose attempt to describe the context of human existence.