I finished blindsight by peter watts. Spoilers for blindsight and also other books.

The book reminded me a lot of the work of R Scott Bakker. Who I also really like. I don't have a tin to say about it, but the way it treats meaning is very similar. In the prince of nothing series, the titular Prince of Nothing, Kellhus, is something of a Laplace Demon. He shows up, decides what his goals are, and then uses his godlike intelligence to set that in motion by saying and doing whatever he needs to to make his grand design fall into place. Everything else is the world reacting to Kellhus. Sort of. In his book Neuropath he explores the idea that meaning is meaningless, and we're just brains trying to make themselves happy. Sort of. I'm not doing it justice. These themes are also big in blindsight. A meditation on cognition, and first contact with aliens who have a fundamentally incomprehensible to us way of existing. Is consciousness itself an evolutionary dead end? Interesting book, I recommend it.