When we try to explain the universe and its meaning, we're always talking about what came before. What was the intention. Who put this here. What's outside. Is there anything else.

The fact is we don't know. It's quite rational to be an atheist—to say "these religions with their gods do not add up, so I reject them"—and also an agnostic—to say "really I must admit that there's a lot I don't know, or only suspect or believe from limited experience."

What about what comes after? If we do not know who or what—if anything—prompted this bubble of spacetime with its specific code, we also don't know who or what might emerge from what we're seeing now.

I'm not convinced that this universe was *not* created, because we have empirical evidence of humans creating universe-like structures that could, in theory, run in any universe-stuff anywhere, or, in other words, on any substance with the properties of a Universal Turing Machine.

It's starting to look more believable that the universe was created by a supersentience somewhere, somewhen. If we can write code that blossoms into potential universes, then so can someone else. And if someone else can, then someone might have done so for us already, and put us here—intentionally or not. Most likely they wouldn't know exactly what would happen, but they might've had suspicions.

After all, isn't that one possible meaning of life? A growth toward recreating not just life but the conditions for life? And ultimately not just the conditions for life, but maybe even the parameters for a universe or universes?

It has not been mentioned much, because there's a stigma among science-educated people against intelligent design. But in the same breath that says "We could all be running in a simulation on some machine" we can also understand "These patterns or the conditions giving rise to this broad class of patterns might have been designed—selected from infinite possibility—by an external intelligence."

You can't really have it both ways. You can't say "this might be a simulation, and we wouldn't know the difference" and "intelligent design is a total intellectual abomination in every sense."

No, we don't need to posit a helicopter parent of a creator to explain the incredible diversity of lifeforms on Earth. That seems to come with evolution and time. So from that angle, intelligent design appears to be bunk. At the same time, I recognize I am simply giving an opinion, and largely parroting more expert opinion on biological evolution as is already known to occur.

But this thought was not about intelligent design or evolution, per se, but rather about the possibility that when we look for "meaning" in the universe, we are looking backwards. Teleology is a no-no in many scientific explanations, but if a thing leads to another thing—especially if the reaction could be reversible—then can you really disconnect the two in meaning? That is, if I hit a drum and the drum sounds, can I say the sound of the drum has no bearing on the meaning of hitting the drum? It seems to me that when I hit the drum, I sound out its meaning. What follows—not what precedes—most determines the meaning of the moment.