Yup, agree with the fact that humans tend to see patterns where none exist (faces in the clouds anyone? 🙂 )

Yes, like most people who live in Italy under the shadow of the Vatican, I also keep the door open to the possibility that there is some inherent meaning. However, we know that humans have a tendency to see or infer order in situations we know to be random. This is a major weakness we have. Knowing that we have this tendency (and several other similar biases) makes it more implausible that there would be an inherent order, but we just aren’t noticing it. In any case, we don’t really need that order in or supreme consciousness in order to have meaningful lives. That’s because it’s challenges, not rewards, that make us who we are.

Yes, absurd = independent or random is a good way of looking at it. If you hit 5 heads in a row in a coin toss, there is still a 50-50 chance that the next toss will also be heads, since the next toss is independent of all the previous ones. Random stuff happens to people and concepts such as karma or rewards for good behavior that most people believe in (and that are the basis of religions) are probably just leaps of faith.

However, you could also argue that the universe deep down is deterministic, but the problem is that it is so complex that we haven’t been able to dig down to the initial causes. That’s in a way applying the argument of chaos theory. Things might seem random at first sight, but there are underlying mechanisms at work which in reality aren’t random, but since the system is so sensitive to any slight differences, it can swing in wild ways and give the appearance of randomness.

You have probably heard of these guys before, but interesting reads that discuss how things like morality could have evolved in an absurd world are Frans de Waal (a primatologist known for his work on chimpanzees), as well as Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene theory.

As for me personally, I am wavering between accepting the absurdity of the world and taking a leap of faith. Not sure which way to swing. I am skeptical of things that don’t have a scientific basis and you cannot prove with experiments, but deep down still hope that there is some sort of inherent meaning in the world independent of your own personal meaning.

I think the utility of evolution in this argument is the same as any objective empirical knowledge: we have to tether our understanding to reality without being overly reductionist. I think Ralph Lewis would advocate for the freedom option (number three). I think the term absurd is correct, but it needs to be understood as ‘independence’ in the statistical sense. Absurd refers to the fact that circumstances are random. Guilty people do get away with murder. Your next door neighbour could be a mass murderer, or a saint, or a sibling you didn’t know you had. But that doesn’t really mean there is no meaning. It means there is no inherent meaning as far as we know. There is emergent meaning, which is the meaning that occurs between sentient beings or that we create by our actions. The mistake the leap of faith people make is in inferring an omniscient being in our own image. Empirical evidence shows that it is more probable that we are making that up. So the sensible thing to do is respect other people’s sensibilities, but not to fall into the same bias.

Wow thanks for the thoughtful comment! Yes, Camus is interesting when it comes to his view on how the world works. He was an absurdist (although not a complete nihilist), in that he viewed the world as not having an overall purpose or meaning, and that every human needs to find their own way. In this he had a different answer from Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who initially defined existentialist philosophy. Kierkegaard went in the other direction, he knew that the world was absurd, but instead chose to make a leap of faith and believe anyways (so a lot of his writings focus on Christianity and God).

I think evolution is a good first principle to always keep in mind when trying to figure out why humans act the way they do. The thing to remember is that evolution doesn’t produce the “best” answer, but instead one fit enough to survive. That’s why there is no perfection, and instead the way living things function consists of a series of trade-offs that are good enough to survive and reproduce.

Will the human race ever gain wisdom? I am an optimist and you can see that over time, humanity has improved and a lot of things in the current world are much better than in the past. However, human nature is human nature and there is unfortunately a self-destruct tendency in there that usually comes to bite us in the ass. For example, I wrote an article on how the current political scene around the world is starting to see the same tendencies that were present when the Roman Republic collapsed and turned into the Empire. Does this mean that history will repeat itself? The warning signs are there, however I hope that we have learned enough so that we can keep from going down that dark path again.