Origins of the Origin

Abstract

This chapter first distinguishes five challenges for ultimate explanations: epistemological, metaphysical, thermodynamic, causal, and that of infinities. In a Kantian manner, I then turn the question of the origin upside down and ask: What do we cognitively expect to be a satisfying answer to the ultimate origin of the universe? I argue that our explanations fall into two kinds of cognitive attractors: the point explanation (e.g. God or Big Bang) and the cycle explanation (e.g. cyclical cosmological models). Exploring and better understanding how our cognition functions in this ultimate quest will help us to unveil our biases and preferences in selecting explanatory models. I critically discuss objections against cycles, such as infinite regress or that an infinite universe would necessarily imply that we would have identical copies of ourselves somewhere or somewhen in this universe or another. I conclude that cyclical explanations are more promising than point explanations, but also that less trivial cognitive attractors are logically possible.