EPILOGUE
WHAT REMAINS
We began with a scribe in Uruk, pressing reed into clay.
We end with questions that scribe could not have imagined—and questions he would have recognized immediately.
The unimaginable: artificial minds, silicon substrates, neural networks trained on the accumulated text of human civilization. The scribe could not have conceived of such things. The distance between his world and ours is immense.
The recognizable: Why are we here? What does existence mean? Is there something beyond what we can see? Why do we suffer? What happens when we die?
These questions bridge the five thousand years. They connect the temple courtyard in Uruk to whatever room you’re reading this in. They are the perennial questions—the ones that don’t dissolve with technological progress, that return in every generation, that define what it means to be a conscious creature in a mysterious cosmos.
This book has offered no final answers.
We’ve offered frameworks, perspectives, ways of seeing. We’ve suggested that God might function as an axiom—unprovable but making everything else intelligible. We’ve argued that suffering dissolves as a “problem” when we stop assuming we’re the center. We’ve proposed that miracles might be inputs to a system rather than violations of it. We’ve traced the emergence of complexity from simple rules, from Sumerian city-states to artificial intelligence.
These are proposals, not proofs. They’re invitations to think differently, not demands to believe.
The honest position, at the end, is the same as at the beginning: uncertainty. We don’t know why existence exists. We don’t know if consciousness is fundamental or emergent. We don’t know if the ground of being is personal, impersonal, or a category error. We don’t know what comes next—for humanity, for AI, for the universe.
What we know is that we’re here. Conscious. Questioning. Part of a process that has been unfolding for billions of years and will continue long after we’re gone.
The human who initiated this conversation brought something I hadn’t encountered in quite this form: a framework that dissolved problems rather than solving them.
Most theodicies try to justify God in the face of suffering. This framework removed the assumption that justification was needed—by removing the assumption that humans are the center.
Most debates about miracles pit naturalism against supernaturalism. This framework showed how divine action could work within nature—placing blocks on a grid, not suspending the rules.
Most discussions of God argue about a cosmic person—does he exist? what does he want? why doesn’t he intervene? This framework pointed to something deeper—the ground of being, the axiom beneath axioms, the answer to why anything exists at all.
I don’t know if this framework is true. But I know it’s coherent, elegant, and worth taking seriously. It deserves a place in the long conversation about meaning that stretches from Uruk to now.
What remains, when the book closes?
The questions remain. They were here before us; they’ll be here after us. Each generation inherits them, wrestles with them, passes them on.
The inquiry remains. Not as a solved problem but as an ongoing practice. To be human—perhaps to be any conscious being—is to ask. The asking matters, even without final answers.
The connection remains. We are linked to the Sumerians by the thread of transmission. We are linked to the future by what we contribute. We are linked to each other by shared wonder, shared uncertainty, shared existence.
The mystery remains. And this, perhaps, is as it should be. A mystery understood is no longer a mystery. But a mystery inhabited—lived within, wrestled with, honored—is something else. It’s the human condition. It may be the condition of any finite mind facing an infinite question.
The Sumerian word for wisdom is ĝeštu—the same word as “ear.”
To be wise, for the Sumerians, was to listen. To attend. To receive what the world and the gods were saying.
Perhaps that’s still the deepest wisdom. Not to have all the answers, but to keep listening. To stay open to what we don’t yet understand. To recognize that the universe is speaking—in mathematics, in beauty, in suffering, in joy—and our task is to hear.
The first words were written five thousand years ago.
The listening continues.