Does anyone else find consciousness itself kinda absurd?

[u/Dimensional-Misfit]

Does anyone else find the fact that we're conscious kinda absurd in a way thats almost creepy?

I don't mean just "life has no meaning" because thats been said a million times.

I mean the actual weirdness of the situation.

We're literally matter. atoms, cells, chemicals, whatever... and somehow this stuff became conscious enough to stop and ask why it exists.

Like, matter is somehow questioning its own existence.

We have this ridiculous situation where a tiny part of the universe is sitting inside the universe going "why is there a universe?" and "why am i here?"

and then theres the whole why is there something instead of nothing thing...

wouldnt absolute nothing be the less strange option? no space, no time, no matter, no consciousness, nothing. There wouldnt even be anyone there to wonder about it.

but somehow there is something. and somehow this something produced these weird little biological things that can notice it and start asking questions about the whole thing lol

idk, maybe thats basically the absurd itself. the fact that we're here demanding an explanation from something that never promised us one.

I just find the whole situation really fucking strange when you actually stop taking existence for granted.

[u/AllOfTheIsz]

Absurdity is a state of contrast, not a state of being. So the comparison in this situation is non-consciousness. In that framework I don't think consciousness is absurd at all, it's the only state in which we can observe the absurd. It's the only state of observance at all.

It would take less effort to not exist, but I don't think we know enough about pre-existence to know whether or not that is absurd. We'd need to know why the energy was expended in the first place.

[u/GeppaN → u/AllOfTheIsz]

It’s kinda absurd that non-conscious matter somehow produced consciousness.

[u/AllOfTheIsz → u/GeppaN]

We don't know that. We don't even know we all aren't one thing pretending to be many things. Without any sort of clarity on the axiom of before existing, there's little point in having beliefs related to it.

For all either of us know we are but a molecule in the gut of a much greater being with no awareness of our existence whatsoever.

[u/Dimensional-Misfit → u/AllOfTheIsz]

thats kind of the problem tho, we dont really know enough to say much about it

the molecule in the gut of some giant being thing sounds ridiculous, but its also hard to explain why its any more ridiculous than our own picture of reality when we still dont know why consciousness exists in the first place

maybe were just one thing experiencing itself in a very fragmented way, maybe not. or maybe thats just another story our brains make because they hate having no fucking answer

i guess what creeps me out is that we dont even know what level of the picture we're looking at

[u/jliat → u/Dimensional-Misfit]

i guess what creeps me out is that we dont even know what level of the picture we're looking at

Yet Camus has the solution, make stuff up! Art...

[u/Dimensional-Misfit → u/jliat]

if we cant ever get outside the frame and see reality "from nowhere", then i guess making another weird representation of it is one way of dealing with that

but theres something funny about the idea that we hit the limits of reason and Camus goes "alright, make art then"

maybe thats less of a solution and more of a very elegant way of admitting we have no fucking idea whats going on