That doesn’t tell me much about what to do with consciousness though. I think we have suspected we really are just made out of meat for thousands of millennia, but this isn’t necessarily a complete answer to philosophy.
Maybe it actually is and this is some crazy, meaningless meat hallucination. I don’t have a way to confirm that and it doesn’t seem to be the case, so the questions Camus raises still seem pertinent.
Apologies if I’m misunderstanding where you’re coming from, I have the sense that I might not be reading you correctly.
I just want to highlight that a lot of traditional western philosophers have a blind spot where they are trying to make sense of the world from an individuals perspective… and I want to make the case that maybe meaning can not be invented for each individual but derived from looking at humanity as a whole from an evolutionary biologist perspective. At least That would be a more modern and scientific approach to understanding concepts like consciousness.
No, when you put it that way I think I completely agree. I don’t think individual humans are a complete thing, so to speak. The idea that we can be an island, that we’re to be self sufficient, to generate goals and purpose and meaning from within – that doesn’t really make sense to me anymore.
It seems only possible to do so properly with a tremendous amount of input and support from other people. Certainly we can navigate the information we encounter and measure and consider what we are doing, but fundamentally none of it is possible without other people. To me, that detail is absolutely crucial.
