Consciousness is Overrated
Consciousness is Overrated
I do realize the irony of my post claiming that “consciousness is overrated,” and yet my consciousness is what leads me to write about it. Let’s see if this contradiction is justifiable.
In April 2025, I was in a philosophical jam about life and meaning with my friend in a hotel room. We’ve often discussed philosophy since we were kids – when we were young and sober, and even now, when we’re older and bored with not much new to talk about – where such discussions require a threshold of energy, usually provided by alcohol.
It’s hard to pin down his stance because it changes with his state of mind, season of life, and other factors. He’s a true intellectual traveler. At this point, he was exploring the pointlessness of life and the low ROI of high ambition. He also believes in reincarnation and that one can achieve a goal in the grand arc of many lives, even if not in the current one, and so there’s less meaning in trying too hard in this life. I recognized it as a form of well-intentioned nihilism, implying that people should be more chill. My take was that even though it’s pointless, it’s still fulfilling to create subjective meanings, to be optimistic, and to try to do some productive things for the world in this life itself. In that sense, my stance was more existential. Perhaps we were arriving at the same point from different directions.
We crashed soon after and went to a Meshuggah concert the next day. Their latest album, Immutable, was on-theme and epic. I remember appreciating their cerebral lyrics while in the mosh pit and the feeling of my brain being pressure-washed. It was therapeutic.
Weeks later, I was in the gym, doing stairs and listening to a metal playlist, trying to conjure up motivation to go longer. I remembered the concert and realized that none of my gym playlists include intellectually stimulating music like Opeth or Meshuggah, which I otherwise love in a concert setting or while driving. Instead, in the gym, I listen to a baser form of heavy music — dubstep, deathcore — mostly noise and some infantile lyrics to fuel me through my workouts. I’d forgotten why. As I moved on to bench presses, I switched to the Immutable album and immediately remembered why. I was hoping to unlock some next-level power and push harder. It was quite the opposite — my workout completely tanked, and I went home feeling a bit low and pointless.
Meshuggah is not the metal to find hope in. It’s a soul-dampening experience where the lyrics are a constant existential struggle, bordering on nihilism and meaninglessness. I left wondering if there’s any metal that resonates with my philosophy, one that’s also motivating as background score to do hard things. It was a coincidence that in April we were debating nihilism vs existentialism without thinking about Meshuggah, which happened right the next day.
What is my philosophy?
Months later, I stumbled upon a DOAC podcast debate on the meaning of life. In my head, I summarized the episode as below:
Host: What is the real Meaning?
Christian: Christianity provides transcendental Meaning.
Agnostic: (Proceeds to highlight logical holes in Christianity.)
Spiritualist: We don’t need the ultimate Meaning. Each person can find fulfillment through subjective meaning.
I felt seen and excited about what comes next.
Agnostic: Sure, I know that. But what is the truest Meaning? Is it that the universe is fundamentally conscious?
Spiritualist: Yes, I too believe that that is the real Meaning.
This was a bit underwhelming.
Yuval Noah Harari implied in Sapiens that humans are really good at creating stories (narratives) to intellectually satisfy themselves and achieve practical goals. With that understanding, one can create meme philosophies, kind of like meme coins — completely made up but with a practical purpose, where humans can place real value.
There’s a bit of memeing and narrative-making everywhere you look — politics, stocks, capitalism, socialism, and even physics (thinking of string theory). You can pretty much justify anything with a good story and participate in it. The fun is in figuring out which story fits best in a given context, with our current understanding of the universe and life. Maybe memeing is Meaning?
I’ve always felt that consciousness can be explained by physiological processes, and it doesn’t seem that transcendental. Even an AI is on the path to low-key consciousness. I believe that in the near future, it’ll be possible to manufacture living beings that can think and feel just like us. You can trace the logical steps from an electron to an AI to a human. That doesn’t necessarily mean that an electron is conscious. On the contrary, that still supports the current dominant consciousness narrative — that there is no underlying magical phenomenon to consciousness; it’s just an emergent property of complexity.
Another way to think about this is that reality itself is a perception stemming from some fundamental universal consciousness. In this narrative, the universe doesn’t exist materially, but its perception is still consistent (physics-wise) in our shared reality. That is, Newtonian and Einsteinian physics still operate in this shared illusion called the universe. This “everything is conscious” story makes a lot of sense because it’s impossible to disprove. It’s another one humans have created to find some meaning.
There’s so much to be asked still in both narratives. What led to the original banger? Was there a universe before consciousness? Why did it exist, and how was it made? If we later find out that the universe is indeed a simulation that god-aliens are running, well then, who created the gods?
Whether the universe is material or perceived, they seem like two sides of the same coin. These are two different ways to tell the same story – that we’re experiencing something we don’t fully understand, but it still behaves in consistent ways. Both narratives can be somewhat explained through physics and philosophy. Does it really matter whether I choose heads or tails if it doesn’t change the game — i.e., my experience of reality — at all? The consciousness topic, and consciousness itself, is overrated.
Some people try to understand consciousness on psychedelics. I’ve tried some, and it does feel ethereal. I’m sure I can have greater, cosmic connections with heroic doses or years of meditation. I can be a spiritual fiend, chasing god and seeing things. But what’s the point? Even if I talk to god on ayahuasca, how do I know it’s real? Those experiences are still just chemistry happening in the brain and fit into either of the two narratives above.
Why do I need “God” for things that can be explained otherwise? I’ll still be seeking more once I’m back to reality. And like a fiend, I won’t be able to describe the feeling without telling the asker to try it out for themselves.
Maybe I’ll be on a spiritual journey someday just for entertainment purposes. But at the moment, the idea of proactively seeking God/Meaning and creating delusional theories is not that interesting to me. I’m interested in theories that are testable, falsifiable, and in the process of proving them with evidence (i.e., the scientific method). I mean, most philosophies and religions were probably imagined through psychedelics, as Norman Ohler will soon find out, and we don’t need any more of those!
Some people seek Meaning for their mental health. Personally, my mental health and motivation are not dominated by my philosophy, although it does play a part. No matter what I believe in or not, I can feel like shit after days of binge eating and not working out. I know many other ways to deprive my body and get into a depression, and also to do the reverse and feel better. I don’t feel any spiritual hole that needs to be filled, so I don’t feel the need for any personal “communion” with god. The practical stuff excites me more, such as applying psychedelics or meditation for self-improvement.
On the other hand, contradicting myself a bit, maybe the mental health crisis today is partly because everyone has access to all the knowledge all at once. Almost everything can be explained by science, and there’s no magic anymore. I imagine that 2,000 years ago, very few people knew about or had access to psychedelics or meditation. It was still sacred knowledge, and even fewer were privileged to experience spiritual states. Those people influenced culture and the average person’s mind to believe in miracles. Somewhere it changed.
Camus’s existential philosophy centers on embracing life’s absurdity — the conflict between our search for Meaning and the universe’s silence, and finding freedom and joy in the act of living anyway. My current philosophical stance is something akin to Camus’s — it’s a kind of curious existentialism with some practical skepticism — where I am a happy Sisyphus, not just because I’ve accepted the absurdity, but because I also cautiously enjoy exploring the unknown. I find new experiences and knowledge delightful if they pass my bullshit meter. Existentialism is my base camp, and I’m exploring the wild — my own soul and the universe — with logic as my lamp. It’s an endless and exciting journey.
In every era of humanity, we discover a bit more and end up with a new set of questions. That search itself gives me a transcendental Meaning. Even if humanity gets destroyed and restarts, or becomes space-faring-level super-advanced, we’ll probably always be in this search for new meaning. I have yet to name this personal philosophy — “Curious Sisyphus” or “Sisyphus Plus”? Perhaps there’s already a name for it, but I like the latter. It’s worth noting that this curiosity-led philosophy is one of many that resonate with me. I also relate to other philosophies, such as those centered on love, empathy, and family. There need not be just one true philosophy for everything.
One of the main advantages of “Sisyphus Plus” is that it’s very adaptable to context. I can always choose optimistic agnosticism when it serves me. For example, if I feel a sense of FOMO for being unable to achieve something, I can always tell myself that maybe there are multiple lives, and maybe I’ll achieve that in some other life. It gives me a sense of calm. Whereas if I really need to achieve something in this life, I can tell myself that maybe it’s my duty/dharma, and I need to focus on it and die trying, which gives me a sense of purpose and drive.
Philosophical curiosity — the “maybes” — can be a useful tool, and it doesn’t require me to blindly believe. I just have to consume a bunch of stories as infotainment, filter by "believable," and know when to pick which.