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Comment by molly0 | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think we should allow ourselves to be very critical when reading older authors writing about concepts like “meaning” of life or what constitutes a “worthy” life.

Some of these big words are just concepts that doesn’t really mean anything without a clearly defined context.

Back when Humanists like Camus where active the context was like:

“Ok, god probably doesn’t exist, so now we have to find new answers to all of these questions”

But today we know even more and should start asking if the concept of “meaning” is even applicable to a single human life but rather humanity as a group (or a processes).

* I’m slightly drunk

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can you explain what we "know" now that changes the question?

I was surprised by this. I don't think Western philosophy has made any progress since Plato much less Camus.

Doesn't "everything Plato said was stupid" count as philosophical progress since Plato ?

Maybe, but that is really only the first step and the easy one. The trick is the second step which I don’t think has been written down yet. That for me would be a sign of progress. I picked Plato because I believe he is credited as first writing down a western philosophy

Only if the things Plato said were actually stupid. They were not.

For example: What DNA is and how it’s “replicating processes” gives us human life as a byproduct.

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.

Although I’m happy to be wrong.

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.

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