I'm convinced that consciousness is a special thing we have, but we're not the only ones which has this, in nature.
On the other hand, I'm also convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, we're not that important.
We're just ants on a wet dust speck which believe that they are gods because we can't see how our scale compares to the universe around us, and happen to build tools and things with these tools.
Nothing is meaningless, but we should stop seeing ourselves as the apex-predator of the whole universe or the set of universes or this run of the simulation or whatever we're in.
To be fair, the ones thing you can kind of reliably conclude about our universe is that keeping entropy low for as long as possible is a favorable condition. To put that another way, don't die.
On the other hand, I'm also convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, we're not that important.
We're just ants on a wet dust speck which believe that they are gods because we can't see how our scale compares to the universe around us, and happen to build tools and things with these tools.
Nothing is meaningless, but we should stop seeing ourselves as the apex-predator of the whole universe or the set of universes or this run of the simulation or whatever we're in.